It’s a story as old as time: a devastating breakup comes out of nowhere without warning, shattering our sense of self and potentially our living arrangements, our friendships, our families.
A recent case is when that breakup went viral when the injured party documented their heartbreak for the camera. It happened when 29-year-old singer Jillian Lavigne, who goes by the stage name Spritely, Posted a video About the death of his relationship in the form of a song.
“Imagine,” she sings with pop-punk angst, accompanied by a video of herself crying, “you’re living in L.A. with your boyfriend and everything’s going amazing.”
It doesn’t stay that way. As Sprightly sings, her boyfriend of three and a half years tells her he wants to move to Texas to be closer to his family. After he takes a few months off work, quits his improv troupe, and drains his savings to move in with her, he leaves her a note saying they’re “incompatible”. Despite the dark twist, the video has humor. “How did I not notice? Wow, what a surprise! Thank you for letting me know that we had nothing in common this whole time!” He sings against an increasingly frantic beat, ending abruptly as he now lives in Florida with his mother.
Within days, the video made it to the front page of Reddit. It currently has 64 million views on x20 million views on InstagramAnd about 3 million on TikTok. At some point, Katy Perry liked it. All of this puts Spritely in a strange but increasingly common position: a terrible event in his life has given him the kind of attention that many artists would kill for.
For Spritely, it was the virality he had for years as a working musician: He had already built a huge following on TikTok and Instagram and had gone viral before, mostly for artists reworking his popular songs in the style of others (if Vanessa Carlton’s “One a thousand miles” was hyperpopor what if Lana Del Rey of Nickelback?) “I probably spent 60 percent of my time trying to create content last year and surpassed that last week,” he tells me. Since he posted the video on October 14, he has doubled that Instagram is followingup to 88,000.
The breakthrough came after she worked hard on an EP — ironically, about her “fairytale” love story with her ex-boyfriend — released to little fanfare in January 2023. “It’s a tough industry, mostly nothing happens with it,” she says. “Now that that relationship is over, all of a sudden people are looking at that EP.”
The “funny song,” he calls it, was written in about half an hour, and he didn’t intend to post it right away. Had she known it would go viral, she says, “I would have saved it for way down the road when I was more ready. Because the truth is, I’m still very, very heartbroken.”
On top of the thousands of comments expressing sympathy for Spritley and sharing their own relationship horror stories, others created threads about how she was “codependent” and miss Earlier red flags. This, of course, is the risk of virality: get enough attention and skeptics are inevitable.
The biggest criticism of Spritely’s video was her decision to post it. “There are things that happen to you that are stupid and unfair and that you absolutely should not post about,” Written by podcaster Liv Agar. “I naturally don’t trust people who upload videos of themselves crying on the internet,” Author Bolu Babalola added.
This choice—to share something deeply personal, vivid, in vulnerable detail—has never been straightforward, but it has never been more compelling. Publish on the Internet When you are at your most emotionally raw. If you’re an artist who knows that hitting the viral jackpot is one of the few ways to build a career without a big budget or the backing of a major label, posting about your personal life can be worth what comes next.
Who’s to say that the funniest song about a breakup didn’t make the next Taylor Swift?
Juicy stories have always grabbed the public’s attention; This is why people buy tabloids, follow gossipy Instagram accounts, and read awkward memoirs or personal essays. Yet social media, and esp Fund creators like TikTok’s, Meta’s and X’sAllowed people to profit directly from their stories with zero overhead (for example, TikTok earned hundreds of dollars from videos through its revenue sharing program).
a great”Story Time” on TikTok Maybe the ticket to a life of 9-to-5 toil and a lucrative career as an influencer who earns their income through brand deals or direct payments from customers. This happened earlier this year with Teresa “Risa Tisa” Johnson, who gained 3.5 million followers and Landing a TV adaptation Her 50-part, eight-hour TikTok series about her relationship with her pathological liar ex-husband. Crying on camera – a burgeoning genre of online content – can selling books, You score a jobor Get a whole lot of Written piece in mind About you, even if the audience can Find it crunchy.
People are monetizing their personal lives in other ways, too: Substack’s newsletter writers set up a paywall at the point of an article when some particularly personal story will be told, such as details about a divorce or childbirth, so that only paying members can read it.
Spritly understands this better than anyone: she will want Made the video About the pressure to market yourself endlessly in a cutthroat attention economy — how it turns individual artists into content farms that feed algorithms. Now that he’s won the social media lottery, the question becomes, “How will he capitalize on it?” We currently live in a world where a single push of a job joke can turn a woman Top podcasters in the country – Who’s to say that the funniest song about a breakup didn’t make the next Taylor Swift?
“I’m in a hurry to get something out there,” she says. “The first month after the breakup, I dropped everything I was doing and just wrote a ton of songs, and I’m trying to get them out as quickly as possible. But mostly the moral of that story is I’m a basket case. I’m devastated.”
That’s the thing about putting your personal trauma on the Internet: you have to relive it as long as your audience does. Perhaps that’s why a very popular method of getting around that particular problem is to steal other people’s dramatic stories and pass them off as your own. one Recommended course “How to go viral on TikTok”. You comb through Reddit’s “Am I an Ass” forum and read them in first person, as if the anecdote happened to you.
Spritely has even encountered this in his own circle, which includes many other artists and video creators “I see that they post something on TikTok that goes viral and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that happened to you? I’m so sorry!’ And he’d be like, ‘You believed? It didn’t actually happen.’
It’s worth asking ourselves, what we would and wouldn’t do if given the chance of internet fame
The lowest form of “storytime” content is, of course, the kind that isn’t even yours. But anyway, it’s wildly popular, which increases the incentive for other creators to share even wilder stories.
The years between 2008 and 2016 are hard to remember as an earlier period in media, where sites like xoJane and Thought Catalog paid writer There is little or no sense in recounting their most painful encounters or stopping their most repulsive takings. The benefits, in theory, extend both ways: Sites get monster traffic for cheap, and authors gain influence and, hopefully, a paying gig somewhere down the line.
The economic chemistry that led to the personal essay boom has shifted. Now that the incentives are in social media, no editors or publishing houses are needed — although, as usual, they still favor the platforms. It’s worth asking why we’re so quick to criticize those who capitalize on viral kismet when the entire entertainment industry is built around its creation. It’s also worth asking ourselves, if given the chance of internet fame, what we would and wouldn’t do. As Sprightly puts it: “This pressure to create content is often a moral issue.”
