My life will not be monetized
I did not come to Instagram in 2011 with any intentions of monetizing my life. I came to the app the way many of us did in those early years: for the photo filters (hello, Valencia1) and to share images with a small group of real life friends. My first post was an image of my beloved cat Falcor. I think it had two likes, maybe three.
Since leaving Instagram four months ago, I’ve been metabolizing how much the app and the culture around it convinced me that everything in my life, including photos of my children (gross!), should be monetized.
After two years of posting on Instagram, the first offer for a sponsored post came through. It was from an herbal tea company whose tea I drank often. Their ask was easy: post two photos on my blog, one grid post on Instagram, and receive $500. This was the biggest check I’d ever received in my business and I was elated. I had arrived! I was cool!
As the months rolled on and my following grew, I received sponsorship requests on a consistent basis. At the time I authored a successful blog and was paid to write for media outlets in the health and wellness space. Creating Instagram content was a logical extension of this work and it brought in a lot of free Sun Potion mushrooms, Osea Minerals Mist, Citizens Jeans, Kosas lipstick, and psychic readings with the legendary Nigel from the westside of Los Angeles.
Those early days were fun. Money rolled in, the asks were relatively low-effort, and the market was not competitive. For a few years, sponsored posts and content became a revenue stream for my business that I enjoyed.
And while I was having fun sipping my mushroom lattes, shooting my new coconut yogurt recipe sprinkled with bee pollen, and facilitating breathwork classes at goop HQ, this work simultaneously began to feed my insecurities.
Without much consciousness, suddenly everything in my life was up for grabs when it came to posting on Instagram, not just food photos or breathing poses. Suddenly, I was analyzing every word in every caption and putting on more concealer just to take a selfie. And, the more openly I shared about my life in images and words, the more I was rewarded with likes, comments, shares, free products, attention, and eventually the holy grail, more money.
Making money from images of myself and what I was interested in didn't feel as icky as you might imagine; it actually felt really good for a while. I've struggled with low self-worth for much of my life, and getting paid to post images of myself and what I was interested in gave me a sense of confidence and value. Each time someone hearted a photo, or left a comment saying how inspired they were by my life or words, I felt important. I felt seen in ways that my younger self wanted to be seen. The awkward eleven year old who snuck downstairs to watch Beverly Hills 90210 because it aired past my bedtime was delighted by the attention she was at long last receiving for being herself.
I wouldn’t have admitted this at the time because it was mostly unconscious, but looking back, this was a big part of the appeal. I felt validated.
As the sponsorship deals got larger, what I was most passionate about (writing and teaching breathwork) began to fall to the back burner. I found myself spending more time and energy on getting the perfect shot of my smoothie, the perfect angle of me sitting cross-legged and doing a breathwork practice in my one bedroom cottage, or staging a new hyaluronic serum in my bathroom (more eucalyptus in the background please) and less time furthering my studies and personal practices. Over the years I inched away from my deeper call, slowly becoming a walking, breathing advertisement for things like $400 radiofrequency facials and sustainable, high-end eye masks.
Before I could get a handle on the repercussions of growing my social media profile, my life and work suddenly merged. I no longer knew how to enjoy simple moments like drinking tea or writing in my journal without trying to turn it into content for consumption and monetary exchange.
And I wasn’t just selling pictures of myself breathing, photos of the skincare products I used in my bathroom, or modeling the latest sustainable sweatshirt, I was selling myself. And the cost was increasing.
With more followers and more money came more expectations from brands and companies. And more expectations from myself. I grew further away from the spontaneous creativity I shared on social media in the early days. Gone were my sweet cat photos and unfiltered selfies. I was promoting that minimalist girl aesthetic as my life on social media lost nuance and became confined to the grid. I felt internal and external pressure to keep up this carefully curated, idealized version of myself. To top it off, I was glued to an unsustainable posting scheduling, at the mercy of the ever-changing algorithm, and needing to garner more press, more likes, and more followers, to keep it all going.
At this point I constantly thought about posting. I exhausted my boyfriends asking them to take just one more photo of me breathing on a rock in Malibu. I arranged and rearranged place settings at Sqirl trying to get the perfect shot of my sorrel pesto rice bowl (yes, it’s still a thing, or so I hear). I asked myself on repeat, would this make an interesting post? How much money can I make from this post? Would my followers like this?
The venn diagram of living my life and performing my life became a circle.
I wish I could say that at this point in the story I saw the light, stepped into my inherent worth, and stopped doing paid ads. It isn’t.
I kept saying yes to ads even through cycles of burnout and eventually my pregnancy. And, the bigger my belly grew, the more the sponsorships rolled in. I kept saying yes to gigs that made me feel important while wanting something more meaningful from my work. The thing is, I already had something much deeper, meaningful, and satisfying in my then-waitlisted private client practice, my relationships, my growing connection to nature, and, oh yeah, my pregnant belly.
The sad part is, none of this felt like enough.
“My scale of worth had torn off, like a roof in a hurricane, replaced with an external one. An external scale is a relative scale; so of course, nothing’s enough. There is no top.” -Thea Lim
I remember feeling empty after a long shoot for a new maternity clothing label in Los Angeles. I flew back to Oakland that night completely exhausted with a deep knowing that it was time for me to stop. I did not want to continue monetizing my life at the expense of myself, my relationships, or my unborn child.
I was exhausted from creating all this work for other companies. I tried increasing my rates but the monetary exchange stopped feeling worth it. I did two final ads with Solomon (one for a lightbulb, yes, a lightbulb) shortly after he was born, then closed that part of my business.
The thing is, I never set out to monetize my life or become a full time content creator2. I also had no idea in those early years how much posting content on social media would take me away from the present moment, keeping my self-worth in a constant state of hanging in the balance.
I don’t have any answers and I am not here to tell anyone else not to monetize their lives or some aspect of them. What I’ve been questioning since fully committing to not posting on Instagram, is where can I place my attention that brings me more joy than reaching for the phone? Where is the joy in my life outside of social media?
Right now walking with my children is bringing me joy.
Putting on a sweater after the longest summer ever is bringing me joy.
Leaving the dishes in the sink is bringing me joy.
Drinking a warm mug of tea is bringing me joy.
Letting the laundry pile up is bringing me joy.
Experiencing a little less anxiety is bringing me joy.
Skipping my night time face oil routine is bringing me joy.
Going to visit an old friend is bringing me joy.
The social media content creator programming runs deep. Even after years of not doing paid ads and months off Instagram, I still find myself thinking, this would make such amazing content, as I reach for my iPhone to shoot a particularly good looking meal (they are very rare these days), our foster daughter in a cute dress by the pear tree, or our donkeys walking off into the sunset.
Just a couple of weeks ago a friend commented on our gorgeous dogs (we have five, I think it’s safe to call them a pack at this point) saying I should consider doing sponsored content again. This land, these children, these animals, you have the perfect set up…I looked around and smiled. In a way she’s right. If anything, my life is the most full and beautiful it has ever been— even despite the chronic exhaustion and the daily difficulties of it all. As much as I would enjoy, okay love, a new sustainable cashmere sweater, a free astrology reading, or some more dollars flowing through my bank account, I also know that trading the shiny snippets of this life for that stuff would quickly dull its luster. I’m not saying I’ll never do a sponsored post again, but for now it feels right to resist.
Apparently these old photo filters are back.
Lately, I've been reading about what a privilege it is to leave social media. I am really enjoying the nuance in essays and podcast conversations like this because they take us out of the binary of social media being good or bad. It’s complicated, especially for those of us who have made content for dollars in the crumbling Age of the Influencer (including creators like Hayden Cohen whose ice water recipe almost broke the internet back in 2023).
Being able to leave the sponsorship roller coaster and dumpster fire that is Instagram puts me in a fortunate position. It was a privilege to close down that revenue stream in my business. I had other work to rely on that was frankly much more lucrative and did not keep me tethered to the Instagram dopamine IV machine.
Thank you once again Ashley for telling your story. I appreciate even more your ability to have enough consciousness to see through the seductive illusion of monetizing social media content and the even more seductive sense of validation received by playing that game. Your last few posts have me simmering some commentary that perhaps will come later. For now, I will only say that sometimes, after we are able to undertake deep self inquiry as you have done we are sometimes left with deeper, niggling questions. Why did I fall for that? Why did I ignore myself for so long? Those sorts of questions: the ones that can leave us questioning our worth on deeper more uncomfortable levels. I am all for asking those questions. They are necessary and logical 'next questions' to ask. At some point I will manage an essay that will I hope read like a love letter to those of you who are spinning out, have spun out, of the insanity of monetizing almost everything in your lives. For now, let me say that none of this is your fault. It's the logical outcome of growing up in the world you have grown up in. Yours, and subsequent generations have been preyed upon by advertisers and marketers since at least the 1950's and that strategy intensified during the Reagan-Bush years in this country. And it's happened because my generation, in particular, has failed yours. We have failed to give you all better examples and alternatives of things could be different and more sane. I always thought if I simply continued to live my life the way i did that more people who told me in my younger days 'there's something different about you' or 'I always wanted to do what you do but there's no money in it' might want to follow my example. (I knew I wasn't exceptional. The only thing different about me was that I figured out well before the age of 18 that I didn't want what everyone else seemed to want. ) Talk about arrogance. My small example could never have been a match for the power and the validation of chasing what defines success in this culture. What more, if anything, could I have done back then? I don't know. But perhaps I can offer whatever support possible to you who have come/will come after me. We can build a different world but it's likely going to take more people spinning off the treadmill to make it happen.
Hi Ashley,
This article is a catapult, I haven't finished reading it but I need to stop and highlight something that has began happening to me here on Substack.
I have put aside a lot of my internal work , I have delayed significantly a lot of things to read and reply on comments and press likes and it has started feeding my insecurities and lonely self.
I must recalibrate this before I end up like you in your younger years.
Thanks again.