Marcus called her into his office the next morning.
Emma smiled. Her face hurt.
Let’s talk Friday?
The problem with being smart and original on social media was that smart and original required time. Emma’s best video—a fifteen-minute essay on parasocial relationships in the creator economy, illustrated with clips from The Truman Show —had taken her forty hours to research, write, shoot, and edit. It had gotten 12,000 views. The video after that, a thirty-second clip of her fake-crying over a spreadsheet while a text overlay read “POV: you’re an HR manager who just saw the Q3 attrition report,” had gotten 2.4 million views.
Then she went to sleep. She woke up to 847 notifications.
The third result was a duet from a teenager named Kai, who had put Emma’s serious, carefully researched video about burnout culture next to a video of himself playing Minecraft and had captioned it “me when my mom says dinner’s ready.” 2 million views.