The Few Seconds That Ate Someone Whole

During my active time on IG some time ago, I used to watch a guy who used to post funny skits. Though it was not an extraordinary thing, I just liked his sharp observation, good timing, and real situation that a lot of people recognized. I can see that he was just building a name for himself, and it is obviously through his consistency.

Then along the line, something happened when he completely went out of character blogs carried his news because it was something loud and borderline reckless for a young talent like him. Totally and clearly designed for attention rather than coming from any real creative space. I totally understand how some of these people work.

And what he did for some few seconds made some attention shift to be shifted on him in a way that had nothing to do with what he has been building for three years. After a few weeks, that moment passed as usual, and the audience that came for the spectacle left just the way they rushed in. And some of us who have been watching his skit were left confused about who he was now.

That trajectory is not unique to him. It is practically a template. The likes of Brainjotter came up and have statedly given us something constant in this country, something reliable that we all enjoy and has accumulated over the year. What made him connect to a lot of people has been a series of posts and comedies that he has done and not just a video, and that is a recognition earned across many ordinary ones.
There are also some international versions of this. Some of the biggest names that we have heard from YouTube today, people like Ishowspeed, eventually scaled into genuine business operations. But for Ishowspeed, there have been a lot of people who wanted to move in his direction, but they ended up destroying themselves publicly in the process.

The challenge culture specifically produces the most honest evidence of what virality actually costs. A lot of people have lost credibility and even died all because they were trying to take up a challenge that the media asked them to take part in. I have seen some challenges like the Blue Whale Challenge that landed some people in the hospital. And to be honest, these are not extreme outliers. Because they are a vivid conclusion of a failed system that is now rewarding escalation and paying zero concern to people who are damaged along the way trying to take part in it.

And what some people have been avoiding to say is that going viral is not a career. It is like a weather event, if that word is right in this context. Because some people just came up for a week, and they fade with aging. And what happened after that is what determined what they had before that. And from what I have seen, most of the people who are still relevant today after going viral are people who were already creating something underneath before it.
One moment does not change a life. It only amplifies whatever the life already was.

Thank you for reading.

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