How a late-blooming athlete internalized performance as identity and carried that wiring into digital fame.

There's a psychological impact of turning your physique into a monetized product.

Diversification of identity roles can function as psychological protection.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Jimmy Sotos about overnight visibility and the mental strain of living inside the algorithm.

Sotos grew up the youngest of four boys in a basketball family. His father played professionally in Greece, and his brothers played as well. He describes his brothers taking him to the gym, investing in him, rooting for him, love and expectation intertwined with the pressure to be good. He knew early on that time and energy were being poured into him, and he wanted to make it worth their while.

“I was maturing late in life,” he reflects. “So in order to keep up with my peers, I had to really train hard and work on my craft.” He remembers being 5’2” as a freshman in high school and thinking, “They don’t know what’s gonna hit them. Once I catch up to them physically, I’m gonna be way more skilled,” he says. “I would bank on this idea and keep training.”

At 15, he made a deal with his father: If he earned a scholarship, he would not need a job. Basketball would be his job.

“I convinced my dad that if I got a scholarship, I could put the hours I would have spent working a job into my game.”

The scholarship came. Along with it came a self-imposed standard that followed him into every chapter of his life.

From Athlete to Algorithm

Sotos’ identity was organized around sport. His father’s motto was: “If you’re the best player in the gym, you’re in the wrong gym.” That ethos of seeking harder competition and never plateauing became his internalized narrative.

“I was always Jimmy the basketball player,” he says. “And then overnight, it was Jimmy the TikToker.”

His rise was abrupt. “I went from a couple thousand followers to hundreds of thousands in a week, and then from there to over a million in less than a month.”

“All of a sudden, no one seems to care if I’m not playing well. They just care if I post a video.”

In performance-based industries, the body becomes currency. In digital culture, that currency is tracked in real time.

“They really like the videos with my shirt off,” Sotos says. “So now I’m getting comfortable objectifying and kind of sexualizing myself on the internet.”

He describes a perfect storm: monetization, virality, modeling contracts in New York, and constant scrutiny of his appearance.

“We weren’t supposed to know how all these people think about us,” he says. “You have 100 people tell you they love you, that one person that says you’re a loser… that one just sticks.”

“Prepare to Hate Your Body”

In Los Angeles, a well-known model told him, “Prepare to hate your body.”

He brushed it off. “Don’t project your stuff onto me.”

Then he started modeling in New York.

“I remember being as thin as I’ve ever been, and they were asking if I could get even thinner. I was like, damn, bro, even thinner?”

Male body image concerns often look different from female presentations. The goal is often lean and muscular at the same time. That can mean restriction, overtraining, obsessive food tracking, and strategic dehydration. These behaviors can turn into disordered eating symptoms but are often dismissed as discipline or optimization (Pope, Phillips, & Olivardia, 2000).

For Sotos, the pressures of being a Division I basketball player, a model, and an online personality converged. He was studying anatomy, nutrition, food science, and recovery while navigating an industry where aesthetics were prioritized over health or skill.

Coffee, which later became a business venture and passion, initially functioned as an appetite suppressant. “I realized I could just drink coffee all day and not eat till later,” he explains. Before shoots, he would manipulate his hydration levels. “I would drink coffee to dehydrate myself, so my veins would pop, so I’d be more vascular.”

Sotos compares food intake and the effort to stick to a healthy diet to the effort of abstinence from alcohol.

“You can go your whole life and not have alcohol, and you’d be good. But you can’t stop eating. You have to eat.”

Eating becomes a constant mental struggle in which each meal involves calculation and rationalization, and each social event includes negotiation. “Should I be eating this? How much of it? Can I afford this cheat meal right now?”

In male athletes, disordered eating and body dysmorphia can hide behind performance goals and be reinforced by coaches and peers. In male models and content creators, the algorithm becomes the judge, resulting in a constant feedback loop: post, monitor, adjust, repeat. The body transforms from being experienced to being managed (Wolfers & Utz, 2022).

The Myth of “Real Problems”

Sotos hesitates when discussing mental health advocacy.

“My problems are so first-world… I have friends that have real problems.”

Many high-functioning men minimize their distress. Because they are financially stable or socially privileged, they disqualify their own distress. But suffering is not a competition.

Achievement has no real measurement in content creation. Virality replaces victory and becomes something that is constantly chased. Metrics replace medals. There is no final buzzer. When posts go viral, the focus shifts to the next post. The constant question becomes, “Am I enough?”

“It’s easy to celebrate sports… You win, or you lose. Content creation is different. You can always do more.”

When a partner sent him an edible arrangement for reaching a digital milestone, he recalls finding it hard to celebrate: “Huh, this is an accomplishment, I guess?”

Multifaceted as Protection

“I’ve just learned that I’m very multifaceted… I’m not just the basketball player, I’m not just the model, I’m not just the guy that yaps about coffee.”

For him, role diversification became resilience. Instead of overidentifying with his persona as a basketball player, basketball became “a vehicle for self-expression.” Content creation, modeling, coffee entrepreneurship, music interests, and family roles each contributed to his sense of self.

The Necessary Delusion

“You need a healthy dose of confidence… You need a little bit of delusion,” he says.

“As a realist, it’s like, who the f--- do you think you are to think you can make it amongst seven billion people? But you kinda have to believe it, you know.”

Ambition requires imagined possibility. In performance-based cultures, self-belief carries individuals through developmental gaps, public scrutiny, and industry pressure. Sotos’ early internal dialogue about catching up physically evolved into a broader sense of self, one that is not up for public vote.

Balan, D. (in press). The Body Business: Maintaining Mental health and Autonomy for Athletes, Actors, and Models. Routledge.

Balan, D (2023). Re-Write: A Trauma Workbook of Creative Writing and Recovery in Our New Normal. Routledge.

Balan, D. (2024). Confidently Chill: An Anxiety Workbook for New Adults. Routledge.

Berger, J. (2013). Contagious: Why things catch on. Simon & Schuster.

Phillips, K. A. (2009). Understanding body dysmorphic disorder: An essential guide. Oxford University Press.

Pope, H. G., Phillips, K. A., & Olivardia, R. (2000). The Adonis complex: The secret crisis of male body obsession. Free Press.

Sotos, J. (n.d.). Instagram profile. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/jsotos1

Sotos, J. (n.d.). TikTok profile. TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/@jimmysotos4

Wolfers, L. N., & Utz, S. (2022). Social media use, stress, and coping. Current Opinion in Psychology, 45, 101305.

© Psychology Today