What Trisha Paytas’ Online Omnipresence Reveals About Us
Before she even hit 40, Trisha Paytas had over 35 TV show appearances, at least 7 published books, more than 8 movie cameos, and over five million subscribers on her YouTube channel. Not bad at all for someone who started out trying to break the Guinness World Record for being the fastest talker. But those aren’t what most people remember her for. Instead, she is remembered for an unedited video of herself crying on the kitchen floor over her ex-boyfriend; naming her third child Aquaman Moses; and claiming on a Podcast episode of Frenemies that “we don’t actually need gravity.”
To her viewers, she’s been a gamer, a mukbanger, a makeup artist, a Wicca practitioner, a tanning addict, and even a chicken nugget. Trisha hasn’t edited a single video she’s posted on her YouTube channel, with the exception of the countless self-produced and self-funded music videos.
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But maybe she doesn’t mind being known for all those things. Paytas said it herself, “I never cared about being rich or anything. Still don’t. I just have this constant need for attention. Maybe it’s a bad thing, maybe not, but that’s just how I thrive.” In a culture obsessed with authenticity, where influencers post Get Ready With Me videos while crying about having to go to work, platforms like BeReal market themselves on forced spontaneity, and people post TikToks captioned what i eat in a day entirely in lowercase for the unfiltered effect, she built her entire career on moments that felt raw, chaotic, and real. As someone who scrolls through never-ending cycles of online gossip, Trisha Paytas has struck me as someone who has been cancelled far too many times to actually be cancelled completely off the face of the internet. What truly boggles my mind is how she has shapeshifted into so many different characters while still being read as authentic to her audience in every version she creates. As a consumer of her content (unfortunately), watching her feels like indulging in a guilty pleasure that entertains me and leaves me feeling completely unsettled—unsettled because I realize that my own consumption directly makes me part of the same group of people that reward her for embodying the performance of realness that today’s internet culture so desperately seeks.
But some part of me also believes she might actually have this whole thing all figured out. Maybe the authenticity that everyone wanted from her was never honesty, but being willing to make a fool of herself. Her job was just to perform realness in a way that was entertaining and digestible for us to consume. What matters to us is looking unfiltered enough to feel honest. And maybe that’s the entire point. Trisha showed us that presenting as authentic to your audience doesn’t mean being true to yourself, but responding exactly to what your viewers want from you, reacting to every shift in trend with hypersensitivity.
Paytas’ constant need for attention, especially on the internet, has redefined authenticity for her and for us; when trends change daily—from Girl Dinner to Owalas to Hailey Bieber Nails to Dubai Chocolate—sticking to one thing feels artificial. The realest thing she could do to be authentic on the internet is to change, and to do so quickly and constantly. This way, we will believe she’s living in the same moment we are, catching up on the same trends we are. The countless versions of herself have given her audience the chance to decide which version of Trisha Paytas feels most real to us, not to herself. When does authenticity shift away from being genuine and become just relatable and easy to consume, yet distant enough to laugh at and meme-ify?
Ultimately, the question isn’t about who the authentic Trisha is, or whether she even exists, but what her continued presence on our screens says about us. If authenticity on the internet means constant reinvention for attention, we, as consumers of such content, enter an inherently contradictory cycle by rewarding performance.