The Relatable Mom Economy is Deranged and Poisonous

"I DON'T KNOW WHO NEEDS TO HEAR THIS BUT...."

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The algorithm as it exists on social media platforms is an organic parasite fed by the tastes and desires of its human audience from which it extracts money and attention. The content economy is rigged to reward controversy, outrage, dark impulses, humiliation, and so on because the algorithm rewards attention over quality.  Therefore attention generates the most revenue.

These incentives that rule the Internet. They are bad and they are not likely to change anytime soon. Young boys pranking their friends on Youtube, self-help Instagram coaches with pastel text posts, adult male gamers spewing racial slurs during live streams, are all just acting under the influence of systems of incentives.

Moms are not immune from these perverse incentives. This is how you get a mother filming her children screaming in terror over a Halloween display and uploading it to the Internet. Without the incentives or money/attention, that clip would not exist.

From this system flows the cultural run-off “real, raw motherhood” content where women film themselves looking despondently in the middle distance, and ‘admitting’ they find caring for children ‘boring,’ or ‘mind numbing’ or simply, ‘not enjoyable.’

Of course, women creating content about how happy they are to be moms is not spicy and doesn’t feed the prurient tastes of the algorithim A mother contentedly nursing her baby is snoooozeville compared to a mother talking about how she wants nothing to do with your children after 7pm. 

Last month, Tik-Tok banned Andrea’s account. When she tried to get a reason why the auto-generated response to her query cited a violation linked to nudity. We’re pretty sure it’s because she posted a video of her nursing her 3-year old son. 

Meanwhile, there are women who have monetized their accounts, landed book deals, and launched lucrative brand collabs all based on content that catalogs how much they dislike being mothers to young children.

 Perhaps that’s too harsh. Let’s rephrase: the women running these accounts have found a way to exploit both the algorithm and waves of profound ambivalence new mothers can often feel.

I Did Not Know About the ASTONISHING Dignity of Babies

This type of content doesn’t exist solely for catharsis or community. This content exists because women are incentivized to create it. Not just by a society that profits from the destruction of the motherbaby dyad, but by an algorithm that solves a problem that our society cannot: no need to choose between motherhood and career when you can make money from motherhood. 

But what are the social consequences of making money off telling thousands if not millions of people about what shitty time you’re having as a mom?

Some may argue, it helps OTHER moms feel seen, heard, or the buzzword of the decade: valid. 

But do mothers actually feel better when they see another woman recording herself weeping in a parked car? I suspect that it actually has the exact opposite effect: it makes moms feel more alone and more frustrated.

Also, if you were to remove children from the equation would the happiness quotient for these content creators/consumers increase? Or would there be something else that made them feel triggered, unhappy, and in-valid (un-valid??)?

Further, “feeling seen” implies a two-way dynamic between subject and observer. Doesn’t the therapeutic consensus over the last hundred years hold that relying on other people for a sense of self-worth is bad for you?

What is the psychic cost of waking up everyday to bang out a reel, text post, or photo collage to describe all the ways motherhood makes you feel depleted, let down, and unfulfilled?

A viral hit based on displays of misery only incentivizes more moments of misery to put on display, thus the content creator must be more miserable, more often, to become profitable.

Maybe the angst is offset by the money you make off that content. But then you’re chasing an incentive that requires extracting some sense of misery from you everyday. Now multiply that by tens of thousands of other women doing the same bit, competing for the algorithm, and that crash lands you into a snakepit of depressing irony: women create this sort of content because they feel alienated from the ideal motherhood experience.  With luck, they turn that alienation into profit, which incentivizes further alienation from motherhood, this then alienates them from other moms, then from themselves, then from their children.

Now you have this mutating online blob of mothers who are miserable or who are simulating misery. Eventually you get weird posts like this that are a bland simulacrum of misery written by AI:

It took me three times to read this self-pitying doublespeak to figure out what this post says: this mom does not have the energy to explain to people that she doesn’t have the energy (but still has enough energy to make a reel) which also takes energy.

Gun to my head: would I rather see moms making money from home, off the algorithm with this shitty content or away from their kids 8 hours a day at a job?I don’t know, man. It’s EXTREMELY depressing that this is even a choice—that motherhood is so undervalued in our society that there are countless women who can monetize this widespread sadness. I guess it beats a day job???

Ok, so we still haven’t addressed the biggest societal consequence of this sort of content:

These content creators who applaud themselves for breaking ‘generational trauma’ are, um, very likely, creating a fresh new sort of generational trauma for their children by UPLOADING their profound ambivalence about being mothers into a forever Internet archive. 

You may think, well, there’s a whole generation of kids who grew up with Mommy Bloggers for moms and they are just fine! That’s likely because what was so rewarding about the Mommy Blog era was how women captured not just the ambivalence of motherhood, but the joys and triumphs. Their children were not the butt of jokes or the fulcrum of pain but the inspiration to write. Mommy bloggers constructed online cathedrals for their children, with dark recess but also towering spires of devotion.

 It’s no wonder that now, as adults, some of the children say they understand their mothers more and try to go easier on them. In other words, they empathize.

Decades from now, a woman pregnant with her first child will be able to see a video of her own mother throwing a piece of cheese on her face.

A son will be able to watch hundreds of videos of his mother weeping alone in her car.

If your mother was one the handful of women who made a career out being an unhappy mom online, will the cost have been worth it?

What if your mom didn’t make any money from this content? She just filmed you, weeping at Lowes, wanting to be held.

Plath and her children

Before the poet Sylvia Plath killed herself, she left cookies and milk for her children so they wouldn’t be hungry in the morning with her not around to make them breakfast (if you’re unfamiliar with Plath, do yourself a favor and order Ariel, it is a masterpiece. Here’s an amazing postpartum poem to entice you). After learning of her death, her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, went to her home and began to sift through her papers and found two notebooks filled with writing from the months before her death.

He burned the notebooks.

By all accounts, Plath was in the grip of a profound depressive episode when she died. Friends report that she had been inconsolable in the days before her death. She was also known to possess a destructive rage when she was low. Her writing, particularly after she became a mother could burn incandescent with spite. 

 What did she write in those notebooks?

 Her fans, feminist critics, and scholars have often framed Hughes' decision to rob the world of Plath's writing in her final months to be an act of malice; a man muzzling his (more talented?) wife, even in her death. Was it jealousy? Was it pride? What was he hiding?

Hughes did allow for some of writing he uncovered to be released. In the introduction to their publication he explained his decision to burn the other notebooks. 

“Two more notebooks survived for a while,” he wrote. “The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it.”