It’s a tale as old as time: a devastating breakup comes out of nowhere without warning, shattering our sense of self and potentially our living arrangements, our friendships, our families.

A more recent phenomenon is when that breakup goes massively viral after the injured party documents their heartbreak for the camera. That’s what happened when 29-year-old musician Jillian Lavin, who goes by her stage name Spritely, posted a video about the demise of her relationship in the form of a song.

“Imagine,” she sings with pop-punk malaise, juxtaposed with a video of herself crying, “you live in LA with your boyfriend and everything’s going amazing.”

It does not remain that way. As Spritely sings, said boyfriend of three and a half years tells her he wants to move to Texas to be closer to his family. After she takes months off of work, quits her improv troupe, and drains her savings to make the move with him, he hands her a note that says they’re “incompatible.” There’s humor in the video, despite its dark turn. “How did I not notice? Wow, what a surprise! Thank you for informing me that this whole time we had nothing in common!” she sings against an increasingly frantic beat, abruptly ending with the fact that she’s now living in Florida with her mom.

Within a few days, the video had made it to Reddit’s front page. It currently has 64 million views on X, 20 million views on Instagram, and nearly 3 million on TikTok. At some point, Katy Perry liked it. All of which puts Spritely in an odd but increasingly common position: A terrible event in her life has given her the kind of attention many artists would kill for.

For Spritely, it was the virality she’d been after for years as a working musician: She’d already built up a sizable following on TikTok and Instagram and had gone viral before, mostly for her reimaginings of popular songs in the style of other artists (what if Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” was hyperpop, or what if Lana Del Rey sang Nickelback?). “I spent probably 60 percent of my time the past year trying to make content, and the last week outpaced that,” she tells me. Since she posted the video on October 14, she’s doubled her Instagram following, up to 88,000.

The success came after an EP she’d worked hard on — ironically, about the “fairy tale” love story she had with her ex-boyfriend — was released in January 2023 to little fanfare. “It’s a hard industry, mostly nothing happened with it,” she says. “Now that it’s the demise of that relationship, all of a sudden people are seeing that EP.”

The “joke song,” as she calls it, was written in about a half hour, and she didn’t intend to post it right away. If she’d known it would go viral, she says, “I would have saved it for way further down the line when I was much more prepared. Because the truth is, I am still very, very much in the throes of heartbreak.”

On top of the thousands of comments expressing condolences to Spritely and sharing their own relationship horror stories, there were others making threads about how she was “codependent” and missed earlier red flags. This is, of course, the risk of virality: Get enough attention and skeptics are inevitable.

One of the biggest criticisms of Spritely’s video was her decision to post it at all. “There are certain things that happen to you that are stupid and unfair and that you absolutely should not keep posting about,” wrote podcaster Liv Agar. “I just inherently don’t trust people who upload videos of themselves crying onto the internet,” added author Bolu Babalola.

That choice — to share something deeply personal, in vivid, vulnerable detail — has never been a straightforward one, but there’s never been more incentive to divulge on the internet when you’re at your most emotionally raw. If you’re an artist who knows that one of the very few ways to build a career without a big budget or the backing of a major label is to hit the viral jackpot, posting about your personal life can be worth whatever might come after.

Juicy stories have always captured the public’s attention; it’s the reason people buy tabloids, follow gossip Instagram accounts, and read dishy memoirs or personal essays. Yet social media, and in particular creator funds like TikTok’s, Meta’s and X’s, have allowed people to profit directly from their stories with zero overhead (Spritely, for instance, made a few hundred dollars from the video via TikTok’s revenue sharing program).

A great “storytime” TikTok could be the ticket out of a life of 9-to-5 drudgery and a lucrative career as an influencer who makes their income on brand deals or direct payments from subscribers. It happened to Tareasa “Reesa Teesa” Johnson earlier this year, who gained 3.5 million followers and landed a TV adaptation of her 50-part, eight-hour TikTok series about her relationship with her pathological liar ex-husband. Crying on camera — a bustling genre of online content — can sell books, score you a job, or get a whole lot of think pieces written about you, even if viewers might find it cringey.

People are monetizing their personal lives in other ways, too: Newsletter writers on Substack place a paywall right at the point of an essay when some particularly private story is about to be told, like details about a divorce or giving birth, so that only paid members can read it.

Spritely understands this perhaps better than anyone: She’d made videos about the pressures of endlessly marketing herself in the cutthroat attention economy — how it turns individual artists into content farms catering to the algorithm. Now that she’s won the social media lottery, the question becomes, “How will she capitalize on it?” We’re currently in a world where a single blow job joke can turn a woman into one of the top podcasters in the country — who’s to say a mostly-kidding song about a breakup couldn’t produce the next Taylor Swift?

“I’m hustling to get something out there,” she says. “The first month after the breakup, I just quit everything else I was doing and just wrote a ton of songs, and I’m trying to get those out as soon as possible. But mostly the moral of that story is also I’m a basket case. I am devastated.”

That’s the thing with putting your personal trauma on the internet: You’ve got to relive it as long as your audience does. Perhaps that’s why a highly popular method of getting around that particular pitfall is to steal other people’s dramatic stories and pass them off as your own. One “how to go viral on TikTok” course suggested you comb through Reddit’s “Am I The Asshole” forum and read them in first person, as though the anecdote happened to you.

Spritely has even encountered this in her own circle, which includes many other artists and video creators. “I’ve seen something they post on TikTok that goes viral and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, this happened to you? I’m so sorry!’ And she’ll be like, ‘You believed that? That didn’t really happen.’”

The lowest form of “storytime” content is, of course, the kind that isn’t even yours. But it’s massively popular anyway, which heightens the stakes and ratchets up the incentives for other creators to share even wilder stories.

It’s hard not to be reminded of an earlier time in media, the years between 2008 and 2016ish, where sites like xoJane and Thought Catalog paid writers little or no money to detail their most traumatic encounters or fire off their most cancelable takes. The benefits, theoretically, extended both ways: The sites would get monster traffic for cheap, and the writer would gain clout and hopefully, a paid gig somewhere down the line.

The economic alchemy that led to the personal essay boom has shifted. Now the incentives are on social media, no editor or publishing company required — although, as usual, they still favor the platforms. It’s worth asking why we’re so quick to criticize those capitalizing on viral kismet when the entire entertainment industry is built around creating it. It’s also worth asking ourselves what, if given the opportunity for internet fame, we would and wouldn’t do. As Spritely puts it: “This pressure to make content is very much a moral conundrum a lot of the time.”