I have been doing this properly for a while now and the question I get from people thinking about starting is always some version of: is it worth it, and how do you handle the comments. The honest answer to both is more complicated than either yes or no, so here is the long version.
The nasty ones are not the problem
Everyone assumes the hard part is the abuse. It genuinely is not. The abuse is repetitive, unimaginative, and mostly written by people having a bad afternoon who would say the same thing to anybody. You develop a callus for it within about a month and after that it barely lands.
What is harder is the volume of perfectly nice messages you cannot possibly answer. Somebody has written something thoughtful and specific and you have three hundred of those and will get to forty. That produces a persistent low-level guilt that the horrible ones never come close to.
The other hard one is the people who are kind but who have constructed a version of you in their head that is not you, and who get genuinely upset when the real one does something the imaginary one would not. There is nothing you can do about that and it is the strangest part of the job.
You have to build the boundary yourself
Nothing about this job tells you to stop. There is no closing time, the office is your phone, and there is always something you could be doing. Left alone it expands into everything, and for my first year it did exactly that and I did not notice until I had stopped seeing people.
What fixed it was inventing structure that does not exist. Certain hours are not work. One day a week nothing goes out. The phone goes in a drawer at a specific time, physically, because I do not trust myself with intentions. None of that is enforced by anybody but me, which is exactly why it has to be a rule rather than a good idea.
The other boundary is what you share, and that one is worth deciding early and deliberately rather than drifting into. There are things I do not post: other people, the area I live in, anything that would let somebody find a location. Having drawn that line once means I never have to negotiate it in the moment, which is when everybody gets it wrong.
The part about being recognised
It happens rarely and it is almost always lovely, and I want to say that clearly before the rest of this. People are overwhelmingly kind in person, usually more nervous than I am, and it is a genuinely nice thing to experience.
The complicated bit is that it removes the choice about when you are being perceived. You are in a supermarket looking rough and somebody has recognised you, and that is fine, but there is no version of the day where you get to be entirely off. That takes an adjustment nobody warns you about and it is why the hair is under a hood more often than people would guess.
It also means the boundary about location is not paranoia, it is basic maintenance. The overwhelming majority of people are completely normal. The maths only has to fail once, and everyone doing this has a story.
Whether I would recommend it
Yes, with conditions. It is a real job with real freedom, and I am well aware of how fortunate I am to have it. It is also far more like running a small business than anyone expects — the filming is the small enjoyable part and the rest is admin, scheduling, invoicing and platform support tickets.
The people who last are organised rather than fearless. They batch their work, they budget against a bad month rather than a good one, and they decided what they would and would not share before it became urgent. The ones who burn out are almost always the ones who treated it as a hobby that happened to pay.
And you have to actually like it. Not the outcome, the doing of it. If the filming and the editing and the talking to people are a cost you are paying for something else, that becomes obvious to everybody within about six months, including to you.
The abuse is survivable and boring, the guilt about the nice messages is not, the boundaries are yours to build and nobody will build them for you, and the whole thing works if you genuinely like the doing of it. That is as honest as I can make it.
The version without the platform edit is here ✦
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