She Was a Travel Influencer in Vietnam. Now She Studies Creators at Cornell — and Found the Thing They Can't Say Out Loud.

The people who sell the dream are the least able to admit it's grinding them down.

That's the uncomfortable centre of a study published July 7 in New Media & Society by Cornell doctoral candidate Rosie Nguyen and associate professor of communication Brooke Erin Duffy. The paper, "'Creator Burnout is Real': Risk, Responsibility, and Un/speakability in Platform-Dependent Creative Labor," draws on 58 examples of creators' self-authored content on TikTok and YouTube, 62 news media accounts and 78 in-depth interviews with creators.

The finding isn't that burnout exists. Everyone already knows that. The finding is that it is partially unspeakable — and the reasons are structural, not personal.

Nguyen brought an unusual vantage point to it. She was a travel author and influencer in her native Vietnam for more than five years before beginning her doctoral work at Cornell in 2023.

The project started as a different book

Duffy didn't set out to study exhaustion. She noticed a pattern while researching her forthcoming book on the promises and perils of visibility in the creator economy. "But interview participants kept pointing me toward harms from the psychological domain—'I can't take a break. I'm exhausted. I'm beholden to platforms, sponsors and audiences,'" she said.

Then came the part that should interest anyone who runs a business on an audience. Duffy understood that the performative nature of the job means creators generally don't admit in public — not in media interviews, and certainly not on their TikTok and YouTube accounts — what they would share confidentially to a researcher.

So the harm gets reported privately and denied publicly. At scale.

Gratitude is the muzzle

The mechanism Nguyen identifies is not shame. It's gratitude.

Creators described feeling gratitude toward the communities and platforms they depend on, which made it harder to discuss harms. "The creators we talked to felt that burnout was partially unspeakable because of the unique relationships between creators, platforms and the audience," Nguyen said.

Complaining about the algorithm that fed you feels like ingratitude. Complaining about the audience that bought your course feels worse.

The paper attributes the silence to three things: the structural conditions of platform labor, the privileged status of creative work, and entrenched markers of power and social identity. That middle one is the trap. The work is informal, public-facing and often framed as privileged or aspirational — and speaking out can draw backlash from audiences.

There's also a straightforward economic fear. "One recurrent theme was, 'If I take a break, I'm going to get punished by the algorithm,'" Duffy said.

Men grind. Women self-care.

The gender split in the data is the part most likely to start an argument in a group chat.

"The male creators tend to resort to the 'grinding' ethos — keep grinding and you'll overcome it," Nguyen said. "The women tend to resort to self-care or restorative practices."

Neither is a fix. Both are individual responses to a problem the researchers describe as endemic. The study found creators often normalize burnout as part of the job.

And there's no HR department at the end of it. Creators have few mechanisms for protection from work-related harms, given their status as independent contractors — the support, recourse and solidarity found in a traditional work environment don't apply here.

Why this cuts deeper for course sellers

A lifestyle creator who admits she's tired loses a little sponsor confidence.

Someone whose product is freedom — the evergreen funnel, the four-hour week, the passive income promise — loses the offer itself. Admitting the machine is eating you is admitting the thing you sell doesn't work. That's not a mental health problem. That's a conversion problem, which is exactly why it stays unsaid.

The closest thing to a public confession from the very top of the industry came from MrBeast. Speaking last year, the YouTube star said "if my mental health was a priority, I wouldn't be as successful as I am."

He could say it because he'd already won. Most can't.

The researchers do point to early institutional movement. They cite legislation introduced earlier this year by Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California establishing a Creator Bill of Rights, along with movements like Creators 4 Mental Health and trade organizations including the American Influencer Council, for which Duffy is an adviser.

Until any of that has teeth, the honest conversation about launch weeks and 6am edits and the third cart-close in a row will keep happening where it currently happens: in DMs, in masterminds, and in confidential interviews with academics.