Virality, Vampirism, and the Cost of Originality in a Copy-Paste Culture

Perhaps I suffer from a heightened spiritual sensitivity, but there’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being a creative person online right now. Not from lack of inspiration, but from watching inspiration get extracted, flattened, and rebranded before your eyes. One day, your voice is unique; the next, it's a trend. Not cited nor honored, just mimicked, algorithmically optimized, and stripped of the spirit that gave it weight in the first place.

We are living in a time where mimicry is mistaken for mastery.

Trend cycles are so short that the original source often gets erased before the aesthetic has even peaked. Take the viral Lizzie McGuire-style vlogs or the moody narrator voiceovers for instance, someone crafts a format that feels personal, intimate even, and within days, it’s been replicated to the point of fatigue. No reference to where it came from. No care for what shaped it. Just duplication, rewarded by the algorithm and mistaken for creativity. This isn’t just about TikTok or timelines, it’s about how capitalism rewards sameness and scale over soul. The platform logic says if something performs well, copy it. If someone builds resonance, reverse-engineer it. There’s no room for origin, only outcome. No credit, just clout.

What’s happening online mirrors what’s been happening in broader culture for years: the erosion of individualism through mass commodification. Everyone’s apartment has the same boucle chair. Everyone’s closet is some variation of the same fast fashion haul. Everyone’s voice starts to sound the same, not because they don’t have one (though, maybe they don't), but because the system teaches them to abandon it. We’re taught that success lives in replication, that there’s safety in sameness, and that your originality isn’t as valuable as your ability to scale. It’s the logic of big box stores and viral audios. A culture where everything, even thought, feels mass-produced. For those of us whose creativity comes from a deep place, a spiritual place even, this is more than irritating. It’s energetically violent because people aren’t just borrowing your aesthetic, they’re pulling from your field.

When you create from spirit, not strategy, you can feel when something’s been lifted. You can feel when someone’s orbiting you not to connect, but to siphon. You don’t always have proof,  but you feel the mimicry, the cadence, the ideas, your language, your presence all cut, pasted, and repackaged without a single nod. What’s worse is, these moments are often cloaked in flattery or “inspiration,” as if calling it that neutralizes the harm. Jessica Teresa’s tweet said it plainly: when people take from you without acknowledgment, it’s not engagement, it’s energy theft.

We don’t talk enough about what it means to be copied as a spiritually rooted creative. When your work is intuitive, your voice is cultivated, your originality isn’t just style, it’s soulwork, it’s not a content strategy, it’s a lineage… a vibration. When someone duplicates your output without ever doing the internal labor that made it possible, they’re not channeling, they’re mimicking, and that’s not flattering, that’s vampiric.

What’s worse is, it’s not just happening among strangers. Sometimes the people closest to you are the ones consuming you the most. They study how you speak, how you think, how you move, then try to embody it without ever crediting the source. They want what you have, but not who you are. They want the light, but not the work. They want your output, not your process. That’s why I’ve become so protective of myself. I can sense when someone’s presence around me is really about proximity. When they’re hoping closeness will substitute for creativity. When they don’t want to walk their own path, so they try to echo mine instead. We’re in a digital moment where surface-level imitation often performs better than source-level originality. The algorithm doesn’t reward nuance, or depth, or even authorship, it rewards format, which means the watered-down copy can often reach farther than the original voice ever did.

I often have to remind myself: reach is not resonance. Views are not vitality. Virality is not value.

The cost of originality doesn’t stop with the individual. When mimicry becomes the dominant mode of creation, when replication is incentivized and spiritual labor becomes a public resource, the damage stretches far beyond personal exhaustion: it begins to alter the texture of culture itself. What was once an ecosystem of distinct voices begins to collapse into a loop of repetition. Original thought gets replaced by recognizable format, and innovation gives way to familiarity. Suddenly, everyone is saying the same thing in slightly different packaging.

The conditions required to produce something original (quiet, discernment, a willingness to risk misunderstanding) become harder to access. Instead of drawing from inner clarity, people draw from whatever has already been validated; the metrics take over the muse, and what we lose, slowly and then all at once, is our creative range, our cultural memory which includes our ability to track lineage, to recognize when something is speaking from the root and when it's just borrowing the shape of depth. The platforms reward what’s easy to consume, and so we adapt, until we no longer know what we would sound like without a template.

This has consequences that aren’t just artistic. When originality becomes unsustainable, we stop evolving intellectually and spiritually. We stop asking different questions; we stop sitting with discomfort long enough to reach something real. The impulse to create from within gets replaced by the urge to compete: to be first, to be fast, to be visible. When speed becomes the priority, depth becomes a casualty. What we’re left with is a culture that feels overstimulating but undernourished.

The social result is a kind of spiritual fatigue. The more we copy, the less we remember how to listen, not just to others, but to ourselves. When everyone is performing originality while pulling from the same few sources, it becomes harder to discern what’s actually worth paying attention to. That’s the real loss. Not just to the original voice, but to the entire collective who no longer knows how to recognize it. What moves people deeply, what lingers with them, what shifts their sense of self doesn’t necessarily come from trends. That comes from truth, and truth can’t be plagiarized because when something is spiritually rooted, the frequency is unrepeatable.

So no, I’m not worried about running out. My creativity doesn’t come from what’s trending, it comes from source. I am, however,  aware of what it costs to be witnessed by people who only want to extract. I’ve seen how quickly homage turns into hunger. How “I love what you do” can become “I want to do what you do” without the discipline, devotion, or discernment it requires. This is why I move carefully and why I trust my intuition when it tells me to close a door, to withhold, to go quiet. Not everyone watching is watching with love. Some are watching to see what they can take, to see what part of you they can wear like a costume, and discard when the next trend hits, but what they’ll never be able to replicate, what no amount of mimicry will grant them, is essence. There will always be only one you, not because you’re gatekeeping, but because spirit isn’t something you can copy. It has to be cultivated, and that’s work most people aren’t willing to do.

So, protect your field. Speak when you’re ready. Let imitation be the evidence that you were the pinkprint all along.