Spritely's viral Texas breakup on TikTok and the new incentives to turn personal drama into content

It's a story as old as time: a devastating breakup comes out of nowhere and without warning, shattering our self-esteem and possibly our lives, our friendships, our families.

A more recent phenomenon is that breakups go viral after the injured party documents their grief on camera. That's what happened when 29-year-old musician Jillian Lavin, who performs under her stage name Spritely, released a video about the breakdown of her relationship in the form of a song.

“Imagine,” she sings with pop-punk malaise, accompanied by a video of her crying, “you live in LA with your boyfriend and everything is going great.”

It doesn't stop there. As Spritely sings, the boyfriend in question, who she has been dating for three and a half years, tells her that he wants to move to Texas to be closer to his family. After she takes months off, quits her improv troupe, and uses up her savings to move in with him, he gives her a note saying they are “incompatible.” Despite its dark twist, the video has humor. “How did I not notice? Wow, what a surprise! Thank you for informing me that we had nothing in common this whole time!” She sings to an increasingly frantic rhythm, ending abruptly with the fact that she now lives in Florida with her mother.

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

For Spritely, it was the virality she had been striving for for years as a working musician: she had already built a sizable following on TikTok and Instagram and had gone viral before, most notably through her reinterpretations of popular songs in the style of other artists (what if Vanessa Carlton's “A Thousand Miles” would be hyperpop, or what if Lana Del Rey sang Nickelback?). “I probably spent 60 percent of my time in the last year creating content, and last week exceeded that,” she tells me. Since posting the video on October 14, she has doubled her Instagram following, up to 88,000.

The success came after an EP she had been working hard on – ironically about the “fairytale” love story she had with her ex-boyfriend – was released to little fanfare in January 2023. “It’s a tough industry in which mostly nothing has happened,” she says. “Now that this relationship is over, suddenly people are seeing this EP.”

The “joke song,” as she calls it, was written in about half an hour and she had no plans to release it right away. If she had known it would go viral, she says, “I would have saved it for later when I was much more prepared. Because the truth is, I’m still very, very deep in my heart.”

In addition to the thousands of comments expressing their condolences to Spritely and sharing their own relationship horror stories, there were also others who wrote threads about how she was doing.codependent” and missed previous red flags. Of course, this is where the risk of virality lies: if you get enough attention, skeptics are inevitable.

One of the biggest criticisms of Spritely's video was their decision to release it in the first place. “There are certain things that happen to you that are stupid and unfair and that you definitely shouldn't continue to post about,” wrote podcaster Liv Agar. “I just don’t trust people who upload crying videos to the internet,” author Bolu Babalola added.

That decision — to share something deeply personal, in vivid, vulnerable detail — has never been an easy one, but there's never been more incentive to reveal it online when you're at your emotionally toughest. If you're an artist who knows that one of the few ways to build a career without a big budget or major label backing is to hit the viral jackpot, it may be worth posting about your personal life, whatever always comes afterwards.

Juicy stories have always captured the public's attention; This is why people buy tabloids, follow gossip Instagram accounts, and read fancy memoirs or personal essays. But social media and especially creator funds like TikToks, Metas and

A great “Storytime” TikTok could be the ticket out of a life of 9-5 drudgery and a lucrative career as an influencer making money from brand deals or direct payments from subscribers. That's what happened earlier this year to Tareasa “Reesa Teesa” Johnson, who gained 3.5 million followers and landed a TV adaptation of her 50-episode, eight-hour TikTok series about her relationship with her pathological liar ex-husband. Crying on camera — a busy genre of online content — can sell books, get you a job, or get tons of think pieces written about you, even if viewers might find it repulsive.

People monetize their private lives in other ways, too: newsletter authors on Substack place a paywall right at the point of an essay when a particularly private story needs to be told, such as details about a divorce or a birth, so that only paid members can read it .

Spritely perhaps understands this better than anyone: She's made videos about the pressure to endlessly market yourself in the cutthroat attention economy – how it turns individual artists into content farms that serve the algorithm. Now that she's won the social media lottery, the question is, “How will she capitalize on it?” We're currently in a world where a single blowjob joke can make a woman one of the top podcasters of the country can do – who says a mostly jokey song about a breakup couldn't create the next Taylor Swift?

“I’m trying to get something out there,” she says. “The first month after the breakup I just stopped everything else I was doing and wrote a lot of songs and I'm trying to get those out as quickly as possible. But most of all, the moral of this story is that I am also a hopeless case. I’m devastated.”

That's the thing about putting your personal trauma on the internet: you have to relive it for as long as your audience does. Perhaps that's why stealing other people's dramatic stories and passing them off as your own is a very popular way to avoid this particular trap. A “How to Go Viral on TikTok” course suggested that you browse Reddit's “Am I The Asshole” forum and read the posts in first person, as if the anecdote itself happened.

Spritely has experienced this even within her own circle, which includes many other artists and creators. “I saw something they posted on TikTok that went viral and I was like, 'Oh my God, did this happen to you?' 'I'm so sorry!' And she'll say, 'You believed that?' That didn't really happen.'”

Of course, the lowest form of “storytime” content is the kind that doesn’t even belong to you. But it's still wildly popular, raising the stakes and increasing the incentive for other YouTubers to share even wilder stories.

It's hard not to remember an earlier time in media, the years between 2008 and 2016, when sites like xoJane and Thought Catalog paid writers little or no money to recount their most traumatic encounters or fire off their most aborting takes . The benefits theoretically extended both ways: the sites would get huge traffic for little money, and the author would gain influence and hopefully get a paying job at some point down the line.

The economic alchemy that led to the personal essay boom has changed. Now the incentive is on social media, no editor or publisher required – although as usual they still favor the platforms. It's worth asking why we're so quick to criticize those who capitalize on viral kismet when the entire entertainment industry is geared toward creating it. It's also worth asking ourselves what we would and wouldn't do if we had the opportunity to become famous on the Internet. As Spritely puts it, “This pressure to create content is often a moral conundrum.”