The Watching Economy
In 2023 I found myself watching a video of someone eating alone in their apartment at midnight and feeling something I couldn't immediately name. Not pity. Not connection. Something more uncomfortable — a recognition of the parasocial texture of the thing, of the way the creator had framed their aloneness as content, had turned a private experience into a shared one, and the way I was participating in this transformation by watching.
The eating-alone video is a specific genre that says something large about where we are. The intimacy of it — the lowered inhibitions of the late-night kitchen, the private activity made public, the implicit claim that we are together in our separate apartments watching this together — is real and also constructed and also really real. Both at once, which is the mode of most things online.
Something has gone wrong with how we watch people. I say wrong knowing it's imprecise, knowing the wrongness is also sometimes richness, is also sometimes genuine connection. But when I try to describe the dominant texture of what I see on the platforms — the way creators have learned to perform availability, to simulate intimacy, to give audiences the experience of closeness while keeping the actual person safely behind the screen — I keep landing on something that feels like a category error. We're treating parasocial relationships as though they're something they're not.
What Parasocial Means and What It's Becoming
Parasocial relationship is a term from media studies that describes the one-sided intimacy that forms between audiences and media figures — the feeling of knowing someone who doesn't know you, the emotional investment in a person's life that isn't matched by equivalent investment from them. The term was coined in the 1950s to describe television viewers' relationships with talk show hosts.
The scale and intensity of parasocial relationships now is categorically different from what the term was developed to describe. Social media has produced a simulation of two-way relationship — creators respond to comments, make content in response to audience feedback, create the impression of a community that the creator is inside rather than performing for — that makes the parasocial feel less parasocial than it is.
The creators caught inside this are not villains. Many of them are people who found a way to turn their lives into content and discovered that the content economy required ever-increasing intimacy, ever-closer access, ever-more-vulnerable sharing. The audience demands more. The algorithm rewards more. The category of 'private' keeps shrinking.
What we're watching when we watch these creators is often someone's psychological deterioration in real time, presented as content, consumed as entertainment, responded to with expressions of care that are themselves a form of demand. I don't know how to hold the genuine care I feel for some of the people I watch against the knowledge that my watching is part of what they're surviving.
The Question I Can't Answer
I keep asking myself what the right relationship is to all of this and not finding an answer that holds. Withdrawing from the platforms entirely is an option that most people find impossible in practice. Engaging thoughtlessly is an option that seems to cost something, both to the watcher and to the watched.
Maybe the answer is something like: watch with awareness. Know that the intimacy is constructed. Know that the person exists beyond the content. Don't mistake the performance of availability for the thing itself.
This seems inadequate. It is inadequate. The thing itself is bigger than any individual response to it.
Something is wrong. I keep thinking about the midnight kitchen video.
I don't watch as much of this kind of content as I used to. The noticing has changed the watching — the awareness of what the consumption is doing and costing has made it harder to do thoughtlessly. Whether this is progress or just a different kind of self-consciousness, I'm not sure.
What I know is that the people I watch most consistently are the ones who seem to be keeping something back — who share a life without sharing the whole life, who maintain some territory that remains their own. That restraint feels honest. It feels like a form of self-respect. I find myself more interested in the held-back than the given-away.
