Why I Kept Coming Back<\/p>\n
I’ve been watching one creator’s videos for years now. Not consistently. Some months, yes. Some topics, yes, others no. The kind of following that ebbs and flows depending on what’s going on in my own life.<\/p>\n
What pulled me back in most recently wasn’t a new format or a trending sound. It was grief<\/a>. She started talking openly about her mental health after a bad breakup, to an audience she can’t see and mostly doesn’t know by name.<\/p>\n Why does this pull me in more than anything else she’s posted?<\/p>\n The Science Says Belief Matters More Than Audience Size<\/p>\n Journaling about pain has always helped people process it. That part isn’t new. What’s new is the audience.<\/p>\n A 2020 study in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media had people write about recent breakups believing an online audience would read it (Kornfield & Toma, 2020). Some were told their readers had been through something similar. Others were told the audience was general.<\/p>\n The people who believed their readers understood them wrote with more depth. Weeks later, they also reported more post-traumatic growth<\/a>: the psychological term for actually growing from something painful, not just surviving it.<\/p>\n Here’s the part that surprised me: This effect showed up before anyone had said a single supportive word back. Just believing you’re understood seems to change how you make sense of your own story.<\/p>\n But There’s a Catch<\/p>\n The same study found that people who expected comments actually wrote less about their emotions than people who didn’t. Knowing you’ll be watched changes what you’re willing to say out loud.<\/p>\n I don’t think that makes it dishonest, exactly. I think it means an audience edits the story a little, whether we mean it to or not. What she shares is probably not her rawest version. It’s her rawest shareable version.<\/p>\n Why the Connection Feels Real<\/p>\n Part of what’s kept me watching for years is something researchers first named in 1956: the parasocial relationship, or a one-directional bond with someone who doesn’t know you exist (Horton & Wohl, 1956). The term is old. The research behind it isn’t.<\/p>\n A 2020 meta-analysis<\/a> pulling together 120 studies found that parasocial relationships aren’t a sign that someone’s real-life connections are lacking (Tukachinsky et al., 2020). They correlate with the same things that build real friendships, like feeling similar to the other person. Watching her doesn’t mean I’m missing something offline. It means my brain is running the same bonding<\/a> process it runs for people I actually know.<\/p>\n