“What we see is never the whole of reality, but only the part that has been filtered and allowed to appear before us.”

By Jane Sonnenschein · August 2, 2026

Some time ago, after taking a six-month break, I started making short videos again. Since then, I have often found myself checking the numbers in the analytics dashboard without even meaning to.

For a while last year, my TikTok account grew very quickly. A few videos brought in several thousand new followers. When so many people suddenly start noticing you, it is easy to believe that your account has entered a phase of steady growth.

But once that wave of attention passed, the views returned to ordinary levels. Every day, some people followed and others unfollowed. Even going a few days without posting could make the numbers drop noticeably.

The reason is not difficult to understand.

Someone who follows you because of one or two videos may not really know your account, and they may not be interested in everything you post in the future. What they liked at the time may have been that particular topic, that particular way of expressing it, or simply the feeling those few seconds gave them.

When later videos no longer match what they first expected, it is natural for them to lose interest. Still, when you have watched your account grow rapidly and then slowly come to a halt, it is hard not to be affected. We easily begin to treat one unexpected peak as the normal level we should have been able to maintain.

I told Chris how I had been feeling. He said that some of the gaming YouTubers he has followed for years have now been creating videos for more than a decade.

In the beginning, they all had regular jobs and made videos only as a hobby. Some kept going for two or three years before their channels gradually built a stable audience. Only when the income had become reliable enough to cover their living expenses over the long term did they leave their jobs and make YouTube their main occupation.

In his view, slow and relatively steady growth is often healthier than a sudden rise followed by a sharp fall. It means that viewers have gradually come to know and accept the person over a long period of time, rather than being drawn in by one video that happened to go viral.

That made me think about an interesting question: why can we accept that someone in a traditional profession may need ten or even twenty years to build experience, yet find it so difficult to accept that a creator might need just as long?

Chris entered the foundry trade when he was sixteen. He first completed vocational training, then gradually built up his experience through years of work.

Suppose the industry had not increasingly been replaced by machines, and he had stayed in it. If he had continued with further training and moved from an ordinary worker to an experienced technical specialist, his hourly wage would probably have risen along with his skills and seniority.

No one would expect a sixteen-year-old who had just entered the trade to become a master within a few months. Nor would anyone decide that he lacked talent or had chosen the wrong path simply because he had not reached the top of the profession after one year.

But in the world of social media, our understanding of time suddenly changes.

Someone creates content for three months without obvious growth and begins to question their direction. After six months without earning money, they decide the platform is not right for them. Then they see someone else become successful within a year and cannot help wondering whether they themselves are moving too slowly.

The internet has not changed the basic way people grow, learn and build experience. It has simply changed our idea of what a “normal pace” looks like by constantly showing us the rapid success of a small minority.

Whenever we open a short-video platform, we are likely to see stories such as: “One million views in three months,” “How an ordinary person earns thousands of dollars a month with AI,” “I quit my job and achieved financial freedom within a year,” or “How one person built a million-dollar company.”

These stories are not necessarily false. Many of the people telling them may really have achieved the results they show.

The real problem is that platforms repeatedly push us towards people who have already succeeded, or at least appear to be succeeding.

The people who tried for a year or two and never attracted much attention rarely appear on our home feeds. Neither do those who made hundreds of videos that still received very few views, or those who spent months studying AI music, AI-generated images or digital products but never found any customers.

It is not because there are very few of them. It is because failure, stagnation and a lack of results do not fit the kind of content that platforms prefer to spread.

A few days ago, I saw someone on Threads sharing his experience of making AI music.

He said the tool had cost him only a little over ten dollars, and he was now earning several hundred dollars a month.

A story like that easily creates the impression that all you need to do is spend a small amount of money, learn how to use a tool and upload some music. After that, the monthly income will somehow appear on its own.

But someone in the comments who had also tried making AI music pointed out that the cost of the tool was not the most important issue at all. What really determined whether it could become a business was whether anyone wanted to listen to the music and whether people were willing to keep paying for it.

He had spent several months learning and producing music, but after uploading it, almost no one paid attention.

AI has certainly lowered the barrier to making music, but it has not automatically created more listeners. It allows more people to produce content, while also causing the amount of similar content to grow rapidly. As a result, it becomes even harder for each new work to receive attention.

This is the part that many stories about AI side hustles tend to leave out.

People who cannot write can now generate articles. People who cannot draw can make images. People who do not know how to code can use tools to build simple websites.

But being able to produce something and finding people willing to consume it have always been two different things.

When everyone can produce similar things at very little cost, the truly scarce resources are often no longer technical production skills. They are experience, judgement, original material, trustworthiness and access to attention.

Yet the internet is especially good at presenting a lower barrier to production as if it were a lower barrier to success.

People see someone using a tool they could also buy to create a product that appears easy enough to make, and a thought naturally arises: If that person can do it, so can I.

The confusion begins when “I can make something similar” turns into “I can achieve similar results.”

I once came across a fable about a weasel and a group of chickens.

In the past, the weasel had to hide and chase the chickens every day in order to catch them. Later, it placed several signs beside a cliff. The signs carried messages encouraging the chickens to believe in themselves, push beyond their limits and bravely learn to fly.

More and more chickens began to believe that if they were courageous enough, they too could fly from the edge of the cliff. The weasel no longer needed to go to the trouble of chasing them. It only had to wait below, where injured or dead chickens would keep falling in front of it.

On the surface, the story seems to mock the stupidity of the chickens. But the more I think about it, the more I feel that what it is really mocking is a very modern business model.

The weasel never directly forced any chicken to jump. It simply created a story tempting enough to make the chickens see jumping from a cliff as a way to break through their limits and realise their value.

Many of the things said online today about writing, personal brands, one-person businesses and AI entrepreneurship are not entirely false either.

Writing really can generate income. A personal brand really can be turned into commercial value. AI really can make people more efficient. And there really are people whose lives have changed through these paths.

The problem is not whether these possibilities exist. The problem is that the people promoting them often show us what is possible without telling us the odds. They show us the results of those who succeeded, while rarely showing us the much larger number of people who made similar attempts and got nowhere.

When an event with a very low chance of happening is shown repeatedly by a platform, it begins to feel much more common than it really is.

If we see videos receiving hundreds of thousands of likes every day, then hundreds of thousands of likes begin to seem almost ordinary. If we constantly hear about people earning money through AI, writing or digital products, it becomes easy to imagine that these paths have already become stable careers that anyone can enter at any time.

In reality, what platforms show us is not the full rate of success in the real world. It is the small group of results most likely to attract attention after being filtered again and again by algorithms.

What platforms amplify is not success itself, but the visibility of success.

The people who quietly failed have not disappeared. They simply never reached our recommendation feeds.

That may be why what truly hooks us is not short-form video itself, but the expectation it keeps creating: perhaps the next video will go viral, perhaps the next project will make money, perhaps I am about to become the person everyone finally notices.

This expectation is not entirely false, because platforms really do give out enormous rewards from time to time.

An account that usually receives only a few hundred views may suddenly get hundreds of thousands. Someone who has posted quietly for a long time may grow rapidly because of one unexpected topic.

It is precisely because these rewards are unpredictable and unstable, yet genuinely possible, that it becomes so difficult to let go of the hope that the next time will be different.

But when someone places their emotions every day in the hands of a success that may happen next time, they are carrying not only hope. They are also carrying the disappointment that forms each time that hope fails to come true.

Today, you think this video should finally get results. By evening, the numbers have barely moved. Tomorrow, you believe the new piece of content may be recommended, but once again, nothing happens.

What wears people down is often not that progress is slow. It is believing every day that they are almost there, only to discover repeatedly that the finish line is still far away.

I have lived through depression and long periods of emotional fluctuation, so I know especially well that a sharp psychological drop can sometimes be more exhausting than a steady low mood.

When I feel well, I can believe that I am capable of almost anything. It also becomes easy to set expectations for the future that are far too high. When my condition declines, I may suddenly feel that none of those things has any meaning at all.

If the traffic on short-video platforms keeps rising and falling in the same way, external numbers can easily become an amplifier for a person’s inner emotions.

Over time, I began to understand that anyone who wants to keep doing something for many years may need to change the question they ask each day.

Instead of asking, “Will I succeed today?” perhaps the question should be, “Did I do what I was supposed to do today?”

The answer to the first question lies with algorithms, the market and luck. At least part of the answer to the second remains in our own hands.

This does not mean giving up hope or pretending that results do not matter. It means accepting that many results will not arrive according to our timetable.

A person can hope that in a few years they will have more readers. They can hope that their writing and videos will eventually grow into a stable career. But they do not have to wake up every morning believing that today will be the day their whole life changes.

When expectations are no longer compressed into each individual day, an ordinary result that does not suddenly take off no longer has to feel like a failure.

Finishing an article, making a video, learning a new way to express something, or simply continuing according to plan can all be real forms of progress.

As for the opportunities we cannot control, if they do eventually arrive, they can become a welcome surprise rather than a promise we wait to see fulfilled every day.

The internet likes stories about things that happened suddenly, because sudden change is what makes a story worth spreading.

But what a person can truly rely on may never be one unexpected piece of luck. It may be all the ordinary days that no one else sees.

What other people eventually notice may be a tree that has already grown tall. Only the person who planted it knows that it did not suddenly rise from the ground one day. It spent a long time without applause or visible change, slowly sending its roots deeper into the soil.

A steady creator is more like someone growing a tree than someone buying a lottery ticket.

A tree grows slowly. During the first few years, there may be almost no visible change, even though its roots are continuing to spread underground.

A lottery ticket is the opposite. The moment the result is announced is exciting, and then it is over.

The internet likes to tell us that persistence will always lead to success. But what truly allows a person to continue for many years is often not certainty about the outcome, but certainty about the choice.

You do not persist because success is guaranteed to come.

You persist because this is the way of living you have chosen.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 真正让人上瘾的，不是短视频，而是成功的幻觉

German version: Was wirklich süchtig macht, sind nicht Kurzvideos, sondern die Illusion vom Erfolg