Sharing your life with hundreds of perfect strangers online has become a fairly humdrum part of modern life, with everyone from teenagers to the elderly broadcasting every part of their existence on the internet.
But one person has taken this to the absolute extreme, 29-year-old Twitch streamer EmilyCC, who has basically turned her life into a self-imposed version of The Truman Show by live streaming her every moment for the past four years.
And by every moment, the female streamer even leaves the camera rolling while she is fast asleep, with hundreds of anonymous internet users typically watching over her while she's unconscious.
As you can probably imagine, this gruelling streaming schedule has completely upended her life, even resulting in a bizarre moment in December where her distraught and tear-filled reaction to her dog's death was transformed into a viral video clip.
Advert
In a Washington Post interview last year, Emily explained how her extreme lack of privacy has come at an extreme personal cost and changed the trajectory of her life.
She told the publication that she had a dream to be married and to buy a home by the age of 30, but now that she is two years away from her goal age, she has said that she is just too busy to obtain those things.
As she has been streaming for so long, it meant that she hasn’t dated or even engaged in causal flings during this time.
Emily is constantly online and has even had to turn down personal invites to weddings and celebrating Christmas or her birthday to keep up her streak.
But after making $5.99 per month per subscriber, it’s a lucrative job.
While she didn’t disclose how much she makes, she did tell the Post: “You can have the best month of your life on Twitch, and you can have the worst.”
According to Streams Charts, her income is estimated to be around $5,000 a month thanks to her constant streaming.
With no days off, Emily has become a big figure in the community, but what affect has that had on her?
According to the woman, who joined Twitch in 2016 at just 19 years old, it’s hard.
She explained how sometimes she doesn’t want to wake up and entertain her subscribers, and that when she feels too depressed, she’ll stay in bed for hours while her subscribers watch her.
However, she cannot simply take a break, as this could be ‘career suicide’ for her as some of those who watch her have already complained that she sleeps too long, doesn’t do as many fun things as she should or even showers too long for their liking.
This cuts her time to herself pretty slim each day.
To this, she explained that people ‘are expecting more all the time’. She said: “I’m like: What more do you want?”
She even streamed on the day she broke up with her boyfriend, and then began her first streaming challenge to win more subscribers by hosting a marathon event.
She said: “It's forcing myself to do things I don't want to do because I want this stream to work. I want it to work so bad that I just don't care anymore.”
Emily shared that her relationship with her parents has been impacted as they can’t understand why she streams constantly, but she can’t show how sad she is as viewers become uncomfortable with the emotional display, and instead retreats to the bathroom when she reaches breaking point.
“If I was always live, I didn't have to think about things,” she said. “I just want to be awesome as possible.”
Topics: Twitch, Streaming, Mental Health, Social Media
William Morgan