If given the chance to gain thousands of admirers for your work, would you take it?

The artists my colleagues and I interviewed for our research on content creators did — and many later questioned whether it was worth it.

Mark, an illustrator with millions of followers, described a deep sense of dread about what was once his dream: making a living by creating art and sharing it online. We used pseudonyms to protect the privacy of the people we interviewed.

“The thing that I got right, that I loved for the longest time and now has almost become the bane of my existence, is creating relatable comics,” he told us. “Now, I’m stuck … I would rather die than make relatable comics, but I’ve built an empire of relatable comics. So what the (heck) am I supposed to do with my life?”

Ironically, the very thing Mark believed he needed to fulfill his dream — a large, admiring audience for his illustrations — began to feel like a prison. What had once seemed distant or abstract now felt inseparable from his work and from his own identity.

As an organizational psychologist, I do not believe Mark’s existential angst is unique, nor do I think it is limited to content creators. It has broader implications for anyone concerned with the future of work.

Although the strange pressure of collective adulation is not new, it is becoming far more widespread — and more insidious — in the attention economy.

A ‘chamber of despair’

The pursuit of fame for fame’s sake has become almost routine in the attention economy. Content creation is, according to some estimates, a US$300 billion industry, one that Goldman Sachs reckons already involves roughly 50 million people worldwide. The bank projects that it could grow to half a trillion dollars — about US$480 billion — by 2027.

Becoming a content creator has officially displaced old standbys such as doctor and astronaut as the job most desired by Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Countless online courses now promise to teach the basics of content creation, and Arizona State University will be offering a new content creation major.

Yet achieving that goal often comes with unanticipated psychological costs — a downside that has become visible well beyond this research, as prominent YouTubers and streamers have publicly announced extended breaks from posting, citing burnout.

The 54 creators we interviewed as part of our multiyear research project — visual artists and musicians with massive online followings — repeatedly described feeling oppressed or restricted by their audiences. They used language that suggested they were being forced into flattened, two-dimensional versions of themselves.

One artist said she had to “flatten and suppress her real self” to engage her audience. An illustrator said she had felt like a “crumpled-up ball of paper” for years. An otherwise chipper cartoonist described her audience as a “chamber of despair” that nobody else understands.

Over time, we came to call this condition “audience entanglement.” It is a state in which creators become so psychologically intertwined with their followers that the audience begins shaping not only what they make — a phenomenon often called “audience capture,” a term that has circulated widely among creators and online commentators in recent years — but also the meaning they derive from their work and how they understand themselves.

Audience entanglement affected creators across many backgrounds, regardless of age, gender or nationality. It appeared among musicians and illustrators, YouTubers and Instagrammers, and among self-described anxious people as well as those who saw themselves as free spirits. No single personality type or demographic was immune to the experience, or to its effects on creativity and well-being.

Suffocated by a pressure to perform

Becoming entangled with an audience meant that followers’ reactions — whether positive or negative — often started to feel like a burden.

Creators described becoming hypersensitive to how their posts performed and spending more and more time each day monitoring them.

Then there were the comments. As Selena, an illustrator, put it, a single mean message “would ruin” her week. While they recognized that they needed an audience to do the work they loved, managing that audience began to feel like a job in itself — and not one they had signed up for.

At their lowest points, the creators we spoke to were not disrupted only by the occasional hostile comment. They said they could not even absorb the most effusive messages from their audience — the kind of affirmations that had originally pushed them to start creating.

One highly successful creator, Maya, recalled receiving direct messages from fans saying her art was the only thing getting them through death, divorce and other catastrophic life events. She found that deeply positive feedback harder to handle than criticism.

“I didn’t know how to really hold people’s pain in a meaningful way, and I was also getting really deep criticism – and, in a way, I could almost deal with that better than praise. It’s just a lot for a person to take on.”

As a result, many creators began to see the creative path they had once wanted more than anything as unsustainable. There was a tragic irony to this pain. The very thing that made their work possible — a large, mostly admiring audience — was also its biggest threat. The audience that allowed them to monetize their creations in the first place had now led to creative paralysis.

Healthy boundaries, intentional engagement

Not everyone we spoke to remained forever imprisoned by their so-called fans. For some, the intense enmeshment eventually became healthier.

The creators who moved in this direction did not stop caring about their audiences. Instead, they learned to set clear boundaries around audience interactions and to clarify who they wanted to be online — what we called “entanglement management strategies.” By limiting the time and energy they spent engaging with the platform, they were able to escape the prison of their fans and once again find meaning and a sense of authenticity online.

As Charlie, an illustrator, explained:

“There is something about hitting this true internal place where, it’s kind of a mystical thing, but some balance between being yourself internally and being yourself externally. There’s some sweet spot there where you know what your audience is and what they expect, and you know where you as a person or creative person overlaps.”

Having spent much of the past two decades researching the psychology of work, I believe audience entanglement does not affect full-time influencers alone.

The ability to cultivate and manage an online audience has become an essential skill in more traditional professions, including journalism, politics and higher education, with large followings sometimes becoming a prerequisite for success rather than a consequence of it.

Most people will never have a thousand — let alone millions — of followers. But many have probably felt some hints of audience entanglement in their relatively ordinary online lives: the addictive urge to check a post again as the likes roll in, or an idyllic afternoon with your child disrupted by a snarky comment from an internet stranger.

While countless influencers offer tips for growing online audiences, little training exists for dealing with the stress of having a large following. As universities such as Arizona State begin formalizing content creation as a field of study, whether those curricula will teach the psychological side of audience management — the boundary-setting that helped some creators in our research — remains an open question.

Previously, only the truly famous — actors, rock stars and professional athletes — were at risk of facing the anxiety of public scrutiny. Now, many of us are only one viral post away from it.

Julianna Pillemer, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, New York University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com