In the 24 hours preceding our first meeting, CJ Clark posted a photo of himself on one of his several Instagram accounts, in which he’s in his underwear, lifting his shirt up to reveal a six-pack and large pecs, and smiling shyly at the camera. Also that day, on another Instagram account he runs, he posted a three-second video of himself in a towel, turning 180 degrees so that the viewer could see his back. Over on TikTok, he posted another video of himself, this time with a shirt on, sitting in a McLaren 720S, mouthing the words to a trending audio clip, flashing his smile again, which also, crucially, means flashing his braces, which his fans keep asking to see more of. This video is also a few seconds long.
There’s nothing particularly creative or novel or interesting about these pieces of content, but they do their job. The more CJ posts, the more followers he gets (he currently has hundreds of thousands but used to have over a million before his Instagram and TikTok accounts got banned for the umpteenth time). The more followers he gets, the more people who click the link in his bio. And if even a small percentage of those people get a bit curious and head over to his OnlyFans, where they can see much, much more of CJ, then CJ gets a lot of money. “McLaren 720S” kind of money. “McLaren 720S and a Porsche right next to it in a garage, and the four-bedroom house attached to that garage in the suburbs of San Diego and enough savings to retire in a few years if he wanted to (which he does not)” kind of money.
CJ Clark is a millionaire. He is 21 years old. And, when I met him that beautiful California spring day, after he showed me how loud a McLaren’s tailpipes are when you push the start button (very loud!), and introduced me to his very expensive cat, and gave me a brief tour of his home (the cat has her own room), he flashed that signature boyish smile at me and told me he was glad I was there. Otherwise, with his content production wrapped and posted for the day, he’d have nothing else to do. CJ often goes a week without talking to anyone, or at least anyone in person.
“Living alone in a big house is super lonely,” CJ said. “The bigger the house, the lonelier you get.”
I came to CJ’s big house, to these tan and beige and ecru and taupe suburbs a little under an hour from downtown San Diego and a little over an hour from the southern edge of Los Angeles, to put a face to the name; or rather, to put a person to the face—to figure out what his actual life, beyond the three second videos, might be like. I am not similar to CJ—I do not have a large house or a McLaren and, most crushingly, have never had even the faint beginnings of a six-pack. And yet when I’d heard about him, about his life out in the middle of a random California suburb, it sounded not so different from mine, and not so different from the lives of a lot of friends, and not so different from the lives of a lot of people these days: run by the internet, and so social in that sense—involving dozens or hundreds of thousands of micro-interactions each day; and yet otherwise, in the much realer sense, not social at all.
CJ has risen to the highest ranks of the internet economy. In the eight years OnlyFans has been around, it’s grown immensely popular—the site pulled in nearly $8 billion in 2024. But that money isn’t distributed equally. There are 5.3 million OnlyFans creators, which means each is making an average of about $1,500 yearly. CJ can make that in an hour. He says he’s in the top 0.06% of earners on the platform.
But even there, having achieved his generation’s wildest dreams (57% of Gen Z’ers say their ideal career is “influencer”), as he pushes against the outer limits of social media’s promise, he’s run into a limit he cannot seem to overcome. The real world, the one with actual people in all their uncurated flesh, is as distant as ever and, it seems, for him and everyone else too, increasingly so. Americans are spending nearly 10 more hours a week alone than they did 10 years ago. The country, according to the US Surgeon General, is in the grip of a loneliness epidemic.
Into this chasm, tens of billions of dollars have been poured—by the likes of Meta and TikTok and Twitch—services through which we get to know (or at least feel like we get to know) our digital friends of choice. Monetized loneliness. There’s a reason the once-niche term “parasocial” has become a household phrase—chefs and makeup artists and gamers and porn stars can all make money now by serving you not just content but closeness, or the illusion of same. Though to call CJ a porn star might be inaccurate, because while, yes, if you pay him $15 a month you can see him naked, he acknowledges that that’s not really the point. The point is to get to know CJ, as if he were your friend.
“If they wanna just see some hot dude, they go to PornHub,” CJ told me as we stood in his slightly overgrown and cluttered backyard, with its view of highways and mountains and strip malls and everything else California has to offer. “No one wants your content to be, ‘Hey look how sexy I am. You should pay me money to see my penis.’ They wanna see you for you.”
That’s a crucial difference between OnlyFans and porn websites—its appeal is not only the nudes and the videos, it’s the connection subscribers feel to creators. That’s what keeps them coming back. That’s why there are multiple companies set up that take a cut of creators’ revenue in exchange for DM’ing with their thousands of fans, giving the subscribers the impression that they’re conversing directly with their favorite star. CJ hired one of those services for a bit—but he found that he preferred directly messaging his fans, which he does for several hours each day.
“I get paid so much fucking money to do OnlyFans—I might as well do it to the best of my ability,” he said. “Talking to my people, learning what they wanna see more of, what they like, what they don’t like, so I can be better at my job.”
He’s had guys who message him through OnlyFans every day for over two years, guys who tell him they’ve just put their kids to bed, that their wives are in the other room. Sometimes he feels bad for them; knows they’re probably lonely and sad. But that’s the game, right?
CJ gets it, because he does the same thing—the vast majority of his own social interaction is mediated through the internet too. He’s only had one serious girlfriend, and that was long distance. He told me he’s not good at talking to strangers face-to-face. He’s not used to doing it that way. Instead, CJ subscribes to other OnlyFans creators, and sometimes messages with them, even though he knows he’s probably not messaging the actual person.
“I know in the back of my head that I’m talking to some middle-aged man” at a subcontracted agency, CJ told me. But he’s okay with buying into the fantasy. Yes, when he messages these people it’s more for companionship than sex—but in that way, CJ told me, “it’s still porn.”
When CJ was growing up outside Seattle, nothing seemed to come easily to him. His two sisters—one younger, one older—kept their heads down, focused on school, found things they were passionate about. For CJ, life was a lot less clear. He was “super dyslexic” and “super ADHD”—diagnosed in third grade. He practiced dance and jumped rope, and that led to some bullying. He didn’t have many friends. He sucked at school. He would always get into arguments with his parents about having no clear direction in life. Recently, a doctor told him he might have Asperger’s.
CJ grew up in the shadow of the internet’s progenitors. Seattle breeds you to be a computer scientist, he said. Microsoft and Google and Amazon were right there, a few miles away from his childhood home. But CJ struggled to figure out how he’d fit into that culture. And yet, the internet was always there for him, less as a potential employer and more as a friend. CJ was a “gargantuan porn addict” by the age of 12. As he went through high school, and OnlyFans came into being, CJ and his friends would dish about stars they had crushes on.
CJ knew he didn’t want to go to college, but he wasn’t sure what else to do. He thought he might try to become a firefighter. He even took classes to prepare for the test. But then he started making content on TikTok —just silly videos with friends, filled with “edgy” teen humor that might get him canceled now. But people seemed to appreciate it.
“When that first 10,000 views hit, it was like the craziest ego boost of all time,” CJ told me. “It went from feeling like I never had any attention in my life to like, holy shit—10,000 people were seeing me be myself. And they all liked it.”
His mom told him that future employers might see that content, so CJ deleted everything and started over, this time with the focus on growth. When CJ was 17, his parents, after much begging, bought him a motorcycle. CJ began filming his rides. Within a month he went from 10,000 followers on TikTok to a million. And as his following grew, so, too, did the number of comments under each of his posts wondering if CJ would start an OnlyFans as soon as he turned 18. He felt conflicted—if he started posting nudes, that would be it for his dream of being a firefighter (it’s harder to get hired if everyone knows you’re a porn star).
But, by the time he was 18, CJ felt stuck in life. He was living at his dad’s house. Financial independence seemed so far away. And so one of his friends told him to go for it; give the people what they want. A few months after his 18th birthday, CJ created an OnlyFans and put out the link on his Instagram. Within 24 hours, even without any pictures or videos on the site, he’d made $5,000. Maybe, CJ thought, this could be the future he’d never been able to envision.
He moved out of his childhood home and in with a friend who also wanted to make content for a living. But the friend didn’t take social media as a business seriously enough. CJ thought he had only one shot at this. The OnlyFans had to work. He packed up his Honda Civic and moved to the outskirts of San Diego, first staying with a friend of his father’s and then finding his own place—the one I met him at, which has enough space for him, and to make content, and to house friends who CJ hopes will move in with him someday.
The OnlyFans worked. He made account after account on social media—six on Instagram, five on TikTok, two on Twitter—to funnel people toward the moneymaker. CJ saw himself as part of a larger internet economy. Countless content creators these days make a living by gaining followings on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, then encouraging those followers to deepen their relationship to the creator by clicking a link to a product, or a paid media site like Substack or Patreon. CJ half-jokingly referred to himself as “the gay porn MrBeast.”
The money kept rolling in. And the money was good. Very good. But CJ didn’t really care about the luxuries, at least not at first.
“I was never a big fan of nice things,” he said. “When that first check hit my account, I literally started Googling ‘expensive car.’”
Sure, he’s spent some—the McLaren, the Porsche, the designer cat. But he’s mostly just saved it. He has a bookkeeper, a CPA and a financial advisor to manage everything. The money isn’t what keeps him going. It’s that he found something he’s good at.
Whenever CJ posts a video that does well, he said he gets the same feeling he did when his first video ever got 10,000 views. Except now that feeling comes more at 10 million views.
“It’s kind of addicting,” he said.
CJ is a man of routine. He wakes up at 6 a.m. and starts posting content to his various accounts on TikTok and Instagram and Twitter and OnlyFans. If he doesn’t post every day, his income will drop by tens of thousands of dollars each month. So he keeps the posting up. After his morning content barrage, he’ll go and get breakfast at a fluorescent-lit spot in a strip mall right across the road from his subdivision. He goes every day. He orders the same thing—a breakfast quesadilla with avocado. He used to order eggs benedict. But after a year and a half of that, he got tired of it. He’ll probably get sick of the breakfast quesadilla eventually, too, he said. But not yet. The main reason he goes there is because he gets to talk to the same hostesses and waitresses each day. Ditto for the gym, which he hits every day: “That’s the only place you get to talk to people.”
CJ spends most afternoons making content in his relatively empty home. (He swears he’ll get a dining room table eventually, a permanent one, instead of the plastic folding table that’s been sitting there for the past year. He just has to redo the floors first.) Recently, he’s been making videos with a $2,500, 150-pound sex doll that a sex-toy company sent him. In one video, he unboxed it and put it together. In another, he used it for oral. In another, he had sex with it. Then one where he reviewed it, answering questions his viewers might be interested in: What’s it like living with it? Can it replace a girlfriend? (“No,” CJ said. “You’re still gonna get lonely, obviously. You don’t wanna go full psycho.”)
He rarely makes content with other OnlyFans creators. Partially because he’s afraid that that’ll change the tenor of his page—people come to see him, to imagine that CJ is their friend or lover, and he’s worried that adding in other people will ruin that fantasy. But it’s also because CJ isn’t really looking for sex without emotional connection right now.
“I don’t go to bed like, Ugh, I wish I could’ve fucked someone today,” he told me. “It’s more like, Damn, a hug would be nice.”
By 2 or 3 or 4 p.m., with the content created and posted and the gym gone to, CJ usually has nothing to do. Often, that means he’ll sit in his living room, watching the massive television (he likes The Office), or scrolling through his phone, talking to people he subscribes to on OnlyFans. But he’s trying to break out of that. He’s started baking a bit. And grilling in his backyard. Simple things.
He also recently started talking to a therapist, and this has helped him put this all in context. It’s not that he hates his life, it’s that it—the McLaren and the money and the quasi-fame that brought him those things—doesn’t feel like enough.
A few months before I visited CJ, he went through a bit of a health scare. Doctors thought there might be a problem with his liver. He ended up being fine, but it triggered a memory from when he was a junior in high school, of the time he took too many caffeine pills and had a serious issue with his heart. He says it stopped for just under a minute. It was right after that incident that CJ blew up on social media. And so a few months ago, after that liver scare, and also after smoking a bit of weed, CJ got to thinking: What if he actually did die back in high school?
He’d recently watched a film, an animated one by Richard Linklater, called Waking Life. And in that film he heard something—that in the seven seconds before you die, you can experience an entire lifetime. That your brain can compensate for the life you didn’t live, and give it to you all right then.
“What if my brain compensated for dying at a young age by giving me everything I ever wanted?” CJ thought. “And now my body is catching up. And I just went into this space of “nothing is real. It’s so bullshit, None of it is fucking real. Like, how the fuck did I get here?”
CJ, in short, went insane. It culminated in him running to the house next door where a cop and his firefighter sons live to ask for help, and then eventually to a trip back home to Washington state to regroup for a few months. There, a childhood friend named Max said something surprising: that he was surprised CJ’s break hadn’t happened sooner. Because CJ was right. The last time Max had visited CJ in San Diego, Max had thought the same thing: that CJ’s life didn’t feel real.
As we sat in his backyard and the sun set over outer San Diego and CJ’s fancy cat meowed from inside his echoey house, CJ told me he knows this won’t last forever; that people will stop finding him attractive, that he’ll lose relevance.
And so he’s tried to figure out what a new future will look like. He admires people like MrBeast—content creators who’ve parlayed their money and popularity into something bigger (in MrBeast’s case, that’s ghost-kitchen burgers, chocolate bars, and influencer-branded Lunchables). CJ has a dream to open a boutique in London that sells underwear branded with his name (though he hasn’t been to London yet). Maybe he’ll make and sell dildos in the shape of his penis. He also has an idea for a kind of social media app for people with pets. And he’s in talks with a porn company in LA that wants CJ to lead the gay side of their operation.
But maybe CJ’s future won’t involve social media at all. He told me he hopes it doesn’t. Not only because he wants something new in his life, but because he can see the internet’s horizon and it doesn’t look good for content creators. He’s invested heavily in AI companies and thinks humans might not have that large a role in social media within the next several years.
“As much as that sucks, because obviously my job is social media and the more people on social media the better, I’m actually glad about it,” he told me. “Because I think that society as a whole would probably benefit substantially just from, like, less people being on their phones.”
Whatever he does, he’s hoping it helps with the ennui.
A few months after we met, CJ told me his life was going well. It was shortly after Christmas, and he was pulling in even more money—CJ said people get cash during the holidays, and then spend it on porn. His close friend from childhood, the one who encouraged him to start an OnlyFans, moved in with CJ recently too. It’s helped force CJ to socialize, and it’s helped him grow his business—Roy helps manage CJ’s various accounts and helps him plan future business ventures.
But all the other stuff, beyond his house and his cars and his money, CJ is still trying to figure out. He said he thinks about going back to school and getting a regular job, maybe as a firefighter, nearly every day. But he never seriously considers it. He’s grown accustomed to driving supercars.
At a recent car meet where CJ was showing off his McLaren, he got to talking to some older, rich men—people in their 30s and 40s. He asked them something he’s asking a lot of people these days: how they deal with it all—with the feeling that you could retire tomorrow, and then have 60 years of your life without a purpose.
He was blunt with his questions: How do you not want to kill yourself from having nothing to do all day and no one to hang out with? The answers CJ gets when he asks these questions never satisfy him. Some people say you just pour yourself more and more into work. Some people say you find something that gives you meaning outside of work. The answer that scares CJ most is that it never really changes. That you always kinda want to kill yourself, and that you just find things to distract yourself with, until you die.
“I daily a $500,000 car and it’s just another car now—nothing’s that cool because everything is super cool,” CJ told me. “That doesn’t go away. It’ll just get worse.”
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