The Cost of Keeping Up: AI, Burnout, and What Comes Next

I use AI to help me write, guided by my own style guide to keep my “voice” intact.

I’m also scrolling LinkedIn most days. The posts feel familiar. Polished but impersonal, templated. The rhythm’s too neat, the phrasing too clean, the structure too formulaic.

It’s not the “good enough” AI-generated content that bothers me so much. It’s the why.

People (real people, not just corporate brands) post daily, sometimes multiple times a day, because the algorithms demand it. Staff become content creators for their companies, building personal brands that double as marketing arms. The line between “sharing expertise” and “feeding the algorithm” has blurred.

AI makes it possible to keep up. You can post every day without immediately burning out. But just because you can, does that mean you should?

The Algorithm Demands Volume

Social platforms have made their expectations clear. If you want visibility, post. A lot.

TikTok expects 1–4 posts daily, some sources suggest 5–10 for businesses. Instagram wants 2–3 posts per day, plus Stories and Reels. LinkedIn rewards 3–5 posts weekly, but more is better. X favours 2–8 posts daily.

Consistency matters. Platforms prioritise regular posting, rewarding accounts that show up predictably with more distribution than those posting sporadically. If you’re not feeding the algorithm, you’re invisible.

That’s where AI becomes essential to so many. It’s no longer a tool for refining ideas or speeding up drafts. It seems to be how most people maintain the posting cadence required to stay relevant.

But there’s a problem.

The Hidden Cost of Staying Visible

A 2025 study[1] found 52% of creators are experiencing burnout. Not mild fatigue, actual burnout. 37% are considering leaving their careers altogether.

The causes? Creative fatigue tops the list at 40%, followed by demanding workloads (31%) and constant screen time (27%).[2] When ranked by severity, financial instability came out on top. The pressure isn’t just psychological, it’s existential. If you stop posting, the algorithm forgets you. If the algorithm forgets you, your income disappears.

65% of creators say algorithm changes are the single most mentally taxing part of their work.[3] Their livelihoods depend on opaque systems they can’t control, and those systems change constantly. One day you’re getting solid engagement. The next, your reach has plummeted without explanation.

So creators work harder. They post more. They optimise more. They burn out more.

And now, AI is being pitched as the solution. “Use these tools,” the marketing promises, “and you can keep up without the stress.”

But AI isn’t solving the problem. It’s just masking it. The treadmill’s still there and you’re running on it faster.

The Trust Problem

Platforms claim they’re labelling AI-generated content. Meta says it adds “AI info” labels when it detects industry-standard indicators or when users self-disclose.[4] Instagram introduced similar measures. TikTok and YouTube have policies around disclosure.

But recent tests found that major platforms, including Facebook and TikTok, don’t consistently display these markers, despite public pledges to do so.[5] Enforcement is patchy.

And when the labels do appear, they hurt. Instagram’s “AI info” label can reduce engagement by 15–80%, depending on the content type.[6] Audiences notice. They care.

Only 21% of Gen Z trust AI-generated content.[7] They prefer human-curated material. 85% of news consumers expect clear disclosure when AI is involved in content production.[8] People aren’t anti-AI, they’re anti-deception.

Meanwhile, user-generated content (the real, messy, imperfect kind) generates 28% higher engagement than brand-created content.[9] Authenticity still wins. But authenticity doesn’t scale, and the algorithm doesn’t wait.

Who Actually Benefits?

Not the creators. Half of them are burned out, and more than a third are planning their exit.

Not the audience. They’re drowning in templated posts that feel interchangeable, struggling to find the authentic voices buried under algorithmic noise.

The platforms.

More content means more engagement. More engagement means more time on site. More time on site means more ad revenue. The algorithm doesn’t care if you’re exhausted or if your audience trusts you. It just wants volume.

AI accelerates this. It lets creators produce more, faster, without needing teams or budgets. On paper, that’s democratising. In practice, it’s just making the hamster wheel spin faster for everyone.

Email Works Differently

I’m an email marketer, so there’s bias here.

Email isn’t algorithm and AI-free anymore. Gmail prioritises certain messages. Apple Mail summarises content so users don’t need to open it. Yahoo filters aggressively. Inbox algorithms exist, and as marketers, we’re constantly accommodating them: optimising subject lines, avoiding spam filters, adapting to curation features.

But here’s the critical difference: you’re not competing for reach.

On social, the algorithm decides whether your post gets distributed at all. You can have 10,000 followers and only reach 200 of them. The platform gates your access to your own audience, then sells it back to you through ads.

Email doesn’t work that way. If someone’s on your list and you send an email, it arrives (any deliverability issues aside). It might land in a tab or get summarised by an AI tool, but it’s there. The relationship exists. You’re not paying for reach. You’re not hoping the inbox decides to show your content today.

You own the list. You control the cadence. There’s no arms race to send three emails a day just to stay visible.

Email moves at a different pace. And it consistently outperforms social media for revenue. That’s not opinion, it’s demonstrated in industry benchmarks year on year.

My own inbox is a mess. Hundreds of “mark as read” emails. Subject lines I’ve glanced at and filed away mentally as “maybe later” (who am I kidding?) Those emails are still there. They haven’t been buried by an algorithm deciding I’m not engaged enough to see them. The relationship exists, even if it’s dormant.

That’s more than I can say for a LinkedIn post that vanishes from feeds within hours, or a TikTok video that gets 200 views despite my follower count being in the thousands.

Social Has Value. Just Not All the Value.

I’m not suggesting you abandon social media. That would be absurd, right? Only living in the here and now, outside in meat space? Not chronically online?

Social is brilliant for discovery and building an audience from scratch. If someone’s never heard of you, they won’t find your email newsletter. They’ll find your LinkedIn post, your Instagram Reel, your TikTok video. That visibility matters.

Social platforms are attention engines, and for getting noticed, they’re unmatched.

But email diverges on commercial value.

Email consistently outperforms social for revenue. Not just by a little, by a lot. It’s not sexy to talk about, but if you’re running a business, selling a product, or building something you need to sustain financially, email delivers in ways social rarely does.

There’s another dimension: connection beyond commerce. Email isn’t just for selling. It’s for communicating with people who care about what you’re doing. Your fans. Your community. The people who’d read your work even if you weren’t selling anything.

Social optimises for engagement, not relationships. They want you scrolling, reacting, staying on the platform. Email, by contrast, exists outside that ecosystem. It’s a conversation in someone’s inbox, not a performance for an algorithm.

Then there’s platform risk.

Remember when TikTok was threatened with a ban in the US? Creators scrambled. Millions of followers, years of work, all dependent on one platform that could disappear overnight. Many went to Substack.

Substack offers something closer to ownership. You’ve got your list and content, and if you need to leave, you can export it. There’s still a discovery algorithm, and you’re still reliant on the platform, but the power dynamic shifts. You’re not performing for reach. You’re writing for subscribers who’ve chosen to receive your work.

That shift matters. It’s not just newsletters. Creators are diversifying across channels, hedging against platform risk in ways that would’ve seemed paranoid five years ago.

Podcasting is a prime example. Many creators have started podcasts, not just because there’s an audience for long-form conversation, but because there’s money in sponsorships. If they’re not landing brand deals on TikTok or Instagram, podcast ads can fill that gap. But more importantly, podcasts are built on RSS (Really Simple Syndication), an open standard that predates the walled gardens of Web 2.0. You control the feed. You distribute to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever, but the content and the audience relationship belong to you.

This is part of a larger trend: the slow shift from Web 2.0’s centralised platforms to a more decentralised Web 3.0 model. Platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and others are experimenting with federated or decentralised structures where users have more control over their data and their audiences. It’s messy, imperfect, and nowhere near mainstream yet. But the direction is clear. Creators are tired of building on land they don’t own.

If you’re building everything on rented land, chasing algorithms that change every quarter, posting daily just to avoid being forgotten, relying on platforms that prioritise their revenue over your reach, you’re setting yourself up for exhaustion and fragility.

Email is an owned channel. It’s where the relationship deepens. It’s where you stop performing for the algorithm and start writing for people who’ve chosen to hear from you.

The Practical Bit

Use social for visibility, reach, and top-of-funnel awareness. But funnel that attention somewhere you control.

Build an email list. Offer something valuable enough that people give you their address. Then write to them. Not daily. Not to feed an algorithm. Just when you have something worth saying.

Post less on social. Write more in email. Stop optimising for the platform and start optimising for the person.

You don’t need AI to churn out daily posts to stay relevant. You need a channel where relevance isn’t dictated by an algorithm you can’t see or control.

A Final Thought

I use LLMs. It supported the writing of this piece. I’m not against the technology.

I use it to as part of my drafting process. To write more precisely, to save time on the mechanical bits so I can focus on the ideas. Not because I’m scared the algorithm will forget me if I don’t post today.

But that fear, the fear of invisibility, is what’s driving the AI arms race on social media for a lot of people. And it’s unsustainable.

Email won’t solve everything. But it offers something social media can’t: a direct line to people who’ve chosen to hear from you, on a schedule you control, without an algorithm standing between you and your audience.

Maybe that’s worth building toward.