“How did I make it?” The affective circulation of success narratives in Instagram videos

This study examines the comment sections of increasingly popular Instagram Reels structured around “how did I make it?” narratives through the concept of affective publics. Drawing on qualitative digital content analysis, the study codes 500 comments according to primary emotion, causal attribution, and comment function across 25 Turkish language Instagram Reels videos selected from five themes: The Higher Education Institutions Examination (YKS), graduate study abroad, career, migration and life abroad, and entrepreneurship. The findings show that success narratives do not produce a one-dimensional sense of inspiration. Rather, they circulate admiration/appreciation, hope, cynicism, anger/injustice, inadequacy, and information seeking in different combinations across themes. Broadly, the themes fell into two affective groupings: YKS and graduate study abroad were more strongly associated with admiration, hope, and process-oriented guidance seeking, while migration and life abroad and entrepreneurship more strongly elicited emotionally charged evaluations of inequality, access, fairness, and legitimacy; career remained more ambivalent, positioned between information seeking and suspicion. The article argues that success narratives produce multiple public positions in Turkey around inequality, social mobility, and imagined futures.