The Demand-avoidant Creator vs the Extractive Masculine

The 20s want their ROAR back (it’s OUR TIME!)

May 11, 2026

Working things out in the studio, *my way*. Zoë K. M. Foster ©️ 2025

At the end of my last post on embodying the value of our individual and shared humanity, I teased another big recent revelation: that of the demand-avoidant creator becoming the unlikely heroine of the new world.

The Consistency Migraine

For the last decade, creatives have been told that to “be seen” and “make it” online, we must be consistent. It’s a refrain that all the gurus quickly took up and preached from their pulpits ad nauseum (and believe me, I have several puke bags on hand for this particular pop chorus).

The logic is clear: keep battering away every day, and people see you. Those that quite like your message will soon start to look for you more, and in no time at all (a mere 6-12 months of posting daily), they will LOVE you and want to be in on anything whatsoever that you are selling.

And you know that the truly irritating fact is - it works. Or it has done. But every year online has increased the length of time you need to be showing up consistently in order for it to make a difference. Ten years ago it might have been a week (yes, really!). So few people were actually doing this back then that it made a HUGE difference. Even five years ago a solid month of showing up would push you to the front of everyone’s feeds. But today? I’m no guru but my estimate is at least a year. A year of showing up DAILY, in a repetitive, expected manner.

At this point I can hear all my fellow PDAers grabbing their own puke bags and running for the hills. Stay with me friends, it’s worth it!

We all internalised this extractive bro-marketing

I can’t tell you how long I internalised this aggressive tactic and attempted to make it work for me. The number of “30-day visibility challenges” and advice I took from well-meaning coaches to “keep showing up every day”, and “keep saying the same thing” - because you’d be surprised how many people haven’t yet heard your message, or need to hear it several times before it hooks them!

Shudder.

And I’m not the only one traumatised (yes, traumatised!) by this boorish, bulldozer approach. Along the way, reams of others like me in those coaching groups and challenges found the same. This method wasn’t just difficult for them, it was gut-churningly irksome.

And here’s the other important thing nobody is really talking about, even in the emerging AI apprehension:

It’s extractive.

It is turning you, the beautiful creator, into a mine.

You are - willingly, voluntarily, being plundered again and again and again.

Because you feel you have to.

I wonder if you notice a particular pattern here? A relationship with the masculine that has been repeated and perpetuated elsewhere? Where you feel it’s not safe to say No?

Because in saying No, you immediately become “difficult”, “unreliable/untrustworthy”, and ultimately determined as “irrelevant”.

Demand-avoidance enters the chat

Until the last few years, I never understood that my apparent aversion to being “consistent” and repeating myself whilst showing up daily was not, in fact, a lack of willpower or a massive shame barrier, but a fundamental difference in operating system.

You see, the thing is, more than getting my face in front of people everyday (and yes that is a biggie too), and even more than scheduling myself to share something every day, there’s one thing that brings down all the steel shutters in me immediately.

I absolutely loathe repeating myself.

For YEARS I’d look at all the Hay House speakers and wonder constantly, “How can they show up at every single podcast, interview and event and say exactly the same thing over and over and over?” I used to admire it, to believe it was a special skill. And maybe, in some ways it is.

At the same time I was utterly perplexed, wondering constantly, “Are they not bored out of their minds?” I simply could not process being that familiar with your very singular message and still - somehow - remaining fresh and excited about it.

Because my brain doesn’t work like that at all.

If I have to relate the same story or message twice in a row, you can bet your life savings I’m going to dig deep to say it in the most intuitive, in-the-moment, least polished way possible. Because anything else - for me - is acting, and feels inherently false, fake. I actually feelnauseous and anxious just thinking about repeating myself.

If you’re a specialist with experience in PDA, I’d truly love to hear your reflections on this. I have my own hypotheses, but let’s open the discussion!

Add in a touch of Rejection Sensitivity…

For neurodivergent creators, I’d say Rejection Sensitivity Dysmorphia is pretty darn common. With this I mean, if you’re not already familiar, that any perceived possible slight feels like being stabbed brutally in the heart, kidneys and stomach. Repeatedly. This is not an exaggeration. And it is brutal. It often slays the sufferer before they’ve even “put themselves out there”. Just the repetitive thoughts prior to sharing something ‘worthy’ are enough to fell a healthy army.

Combine, then, Demand Avoidance and Rejection Sensitivity with the standardised bro-marketing advice of “Be consistent” and you have a chemistry experiment of nuclear proportions. Again, this is not hyperbole. And if you’ve been gaslighting yourself so far, I am officially speaking directly to you. Making yourself show up again and again and again whilst feeling brutally attacked by RSD (Nobody cares. Nobody sees me anyway. What’s the point?) to algorithms which literally don’t care and with a brain that keeps screaming “I DON’T WANT TO!” every few seconds is quite honestly, a form of torture.

The fatigue of Info-dumping & Not Enough Personality

It’s no secret that we are drowning in information. And in 2026, an increasing quantity of that information is regurgitated via multiple AI platforms, and winds up vastly watered down, misleading, or even completely false.

(SPOILER: Yes, I’m an “elder millennial”; yes I wrote all my dissertations in the actual library; yes I was there when Google was invented and actually worked as a brilliant research tool and not a conglomerate-owned shopping site).

The truth is, I’m not alone is seeing a ridiculous upsurge in the same information being spewed across platforms and across hundreds, if not thousands of accounts and different media types. And it’s all indistinct. Beige. Even with pretty graphics, it is obviously all sourced from the same place. Whether that’s through AI-gen apps, or people picking up the info and re-running it, it’s the same INFO-BLEH.

(Which clearly enrages me as someone who loathes repetition and has a core need for depth, nuanced discussion and original thought - you know, like humans were designed to be 😆).

I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but I am beginning to see a fatigue at being inundated with this thin soup of “creative contribution”. The rapid rise in Substack and independent podcasts show this most clearly - people are craving depth, connection and clear personality as well as newness.

The death of the guru

Guru culture did not pass the entrance exam to 2026. Its über-slick, over-filtered and a-politicised approach failed to read the room vibes entirely. We want real. We want multi (not one)-dimensional. We want to find you relatable and inspirational, and we also want to know you are humble in your fallibility, and entirely open to your own accountability. These are all traits which gurus still fall short of, or at best they do performatively - which (sorry luvvies) we can see straight through because we are in our hypersensitivity era.

Enter the heroines…

So where does that leave us? Perhaps there will be a split, with a swathe of the population quite happy to see this endlessly-regurgitated INFO-BLEH and one-dimensional guru-MEH in their feeds, newspapers, and on their TVs and podcasts.

But there is already an evident thirst for something better. The Gen Z adoption of all-things-90s (and as a 90s teen, I’m the first to agree it’s definitely not all healthy!) shows us that even they are TIRED of the slop, and the fake connection, and the performative nonsense that gets us nowhere.

What I am saying is - this is (finally) the time of the Demand Avoidant Creator.

That’s you! And me! And all the multitude of BRILLIANT creatives who have struggled like billy-o for the past 6 years or so as the online landscape has quietly nuked itself.

Writers, artists, musicians and even actors are already sick of the oppressive, financially-controlled boxes they’ve been forced to ‘rise’ within, like some kind of supermarket-forced-sourdough fed on yeast and additives, and suffocated in cellophane.

And so, they are creating communities outside of these forced systems. From collaborative group exhibitions to totally independent, NFP arts grants - new systems are being built in parallel to the existing ones. Because we are crying out for them.

Ground Zero is fertile

I know it feels like we are having to do all the work, and we are exhausted from all the performative necessities we’ve been torturing ourselves through. I know. But the bro-marketing skyscrapers are falling about our ears right now. If you’re not already adopting new ways of creating and connecting, consider this THE time to begin!

We get to do this our way. We get to be wildly inconsistent, messy, radically unfiltered. Punk is here again: fuck the systems. It’s time to reclaim our creativity and connect with each other in ways that actually feel great again!

This is the 20s! And like the 1920s we are in a crazy, chaotic, time of massive technological, social and political change. We get to shape this how we want it to go. Nauseated by the dizzying speed of tech and how it’s fuelling disconnection? Then deliberately embrace some fun analogue ways of reconnecting with your peers and audience - like making a zine by hand and posting it to your fans, or grouping together with a bunch of your creative peers (at someone’s house or a comfy cafe!) once a month to make stuff together and share ideas.

The world will keep telling you you’re broken, but you’re NOT

What I love most about being a Demand-Avoidant Creator is that I get to go with my own flow. Sure, I still have deadlines, and collaborators who need me to meet shared expectations, but around these relative fixtures I get to move my body, soul and energy in a way that feels right to me. I won’t post or share if it feels off - even if I “need” to. And this year I’ve been in the studio less than ever due to exhaustion (see previous post!). While this feels a bit shit in terms of advancing my creative projects, I also know that pushing through won’t help either my art or my exhaustion.

This is such a flex in a world that is determined to control us to the nth degree. And it makes you stand out to those who feel oppressed by these extractive expectations. You are their inspiration! Even if you don’t show up every single day, but instead pop up for weeks or days at a time to share your critical thinking and original creative genius.

Do you identify as a demand-avoidant creator?

Or are you a creative thinker who just loves to see things done differently?

What’s one idea you feel would shake up the extractive masculine systems in our world right how and bring much more creative joy, connection, critical thinking and ROAR to us all?

Cosmic Transmissions Incoming!

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