I promise this article isn’t just an excuse for me to work in a reference to the adult modeling site OnlyFans.
If you’re a fan of the HBO show Euphoria and you’re up to date on Season 3, then you know Sydney Sweeney’s character, Cassie, has started a journey as an OnlyFans content creator.
Cassie turns to OnlyFans for what appears on the surface to be only for money to fund her lifestyle with Nate, but it’s so much deeper than that. Cassie needs attention, significance, and the emotional support that paying fans can give her, even if that support is ultimately transactional and temporary. The money is simply the byproduct of feeling wanted, desired, and chosen by people who constantly reinforce the identity she has built around herself.
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Her entire life has conditioned her to believe that attention equals worth, so the platform becomes less about survival financially and more about survival emotionally. The tragic part is that the more validation she receives, the more dependent she becomes on it, slowly turning herself into a version of who the audience wants her to be instead of figuring out who she actually is underneath all of the noise.
Now, if you’re a fan of Euphoria, I’m sure this season has given you some thoughts and feelings as the character has become rather polarizing to people.
The thing is, Cassie’s character has become a stereotype that now she will struggle to shed. She’s seen as someone who needs attention, and in turn, the OnlyFans career switch gives her exactly that, even though it feels empty and somewhat soulless underneath it all.
Whether you like or hate this season’s storyline, Cassie’s situation is all too familiar to what I see in the workplace, minus the OnlyFans accounts.
I’ve watched people desire attention in their careers so much that they end up taking on a stereotype that they can’t later shed. They want to be seen, heard, and known, and they think that ultimately gives them opportunities that they wouldn’t have received otherwise.
So they take on every project and more work than the average worker, and they get branded as the workhorse willing to do anything to get ahead. This sounds great on the surface, but eventually they don’t get promoted because they’re not seen as the strategic thinker, rather just the person who can output the most amount of work. They burn out, and they end up frustrated, not knowing why they’re working harder than everyone else with less upside.
I’ve seen it with people leaders who get deemed as the motivator and the empathizer. They get branded as people who can only see one side of the situation, as their validation comes from being super empathetic, but not always focused on what’s best for the company. That validation happens in the form of their team loving them, but their leader at the executive level questioning their ability to make tough decisions.
There are the super loyal people who get stereotyped as “never going to leave” because they’ve made it so clear they’re loyal to the brand and the company. This stereotype gets later abused because people think they can throw any work on this individual, and when promotion or pay raise time comes, they wonder why they’re not getting the money or attention they deserve. Their desire to feel comfort and stability ends up getting in the way of their career ambitions.
The scary part about stereotypes in your career is that they usually start as strengths. The hardworking employee gets praised for their output. The empathetic leader gets celebrated for their people skills. The loyal employee gets admired for their consistency and dedication. Over time, though, those strengths slowly harden into identities that become difficult to escape. People stop seeing the full picture of who you are and instead only see the role you’ve unintentionally trained them to expect from you.
The deeper issue underneath all of this is that human beings desperately want to feel loved, valued, and important, and if we’re not careful, we’ll slowly shape our identities around whatever gets us that feeling the fastest. Some people become overworkers. Some become the caretaker. Some become the funny one, the dependable one, the motivator, the fixer, or the person who never says no. At first, those identities feel rewarding since they bring praise, validation, connection, and attention. Eventually, though, people stop seeing those things as occasional traits and start seeing them as their entire identity.
That’s where things start getting dangerous in your career and, honestly, in life overall. The moment you become dependent on external validation to feel secure, you start making decisions based on maintaining the stereotype instead of becoming the fullest version of yourself. The workhorse keeps saying yes when they’re drowning. The loyal employee stays too long in bad environments. The empathetic leader avoids difficult conversations to preserve being liked. The person who built their entire identity around being wanted slowly loses the ability to separate who they really are from the role they perform for other people.
Most stereotypes aren’t created overnight.
They’re built through repetition, reinforcement, and emotional survival. The scary part is that many of us willingly participate in building them without realizing it, simply trying to feel chosen somewhere along the way. At some point, though, you have to stop asking yourself, “What version of me gets the most approval?” and start asking, “Who am I when I’m not performing for other people anymore?”
More importantly, you have to start to ask what version of yourself you love, and you want to be, and start today on the path to changing it if you’re not already living that life.