For a few days, a couple of weeks ago, a small but influential corner of the media world was transfixed by the story of Caroline Calloway and her Creativity Workshop. Calloway is a 27-year-old with a large Instagram following, built by chronicling her time as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge (picturesque lolling on the banks of the River Cam) and her daily life as a gal-about-town in New York City. Early in January, she announced to her 830,000 followers that she would be holding a series of four-hour, $165 seminars in several American cities, a chance for fans to meet Calloway and imbibe some of her wisdom on “true creative fulfillment.” What followed was a fiasco: Early seminars failed to deliver promised amenities, and Calloway turned out to have sold tickets to some events without having located venues for them. A muckraking Twitter thread materialized, scorning Calloway as a “scammer”; she promptly canceled and then uncanceled the tour, all while zapping out flurries of alternately self-flagellating and self-justifying posts on Instagram Stories.

As scandals go, this was minor stuff — more opéra bouffe than outrage. (“This Instagram Influencer’s Failed Tour Will Satisfy Your Fyre Fest Nostalgia,” cracked a headline on New York magazine’s Intelligencer site.) But to many commentators, the episode was a revealing parable of the internet age: a glimpse of the chaos that lurks behind the immaculately curated feeds of our self-styled lifestyle gurus and the hollowness of their advice on, as Calloway put it in the event listing for her seminars, how to “stay connected to your creative self” and “carve out and stick to a creative schedule.”

Give Calloway credit for this: In branding herself an oracle of all things creative, she has her finger firmly on the pulse. In 2019, “creative” is a juggernaut, a ubiquitous word that touches on all kinds of contemporary aspirations and anxieties. Businesses employ creative directors to tackle problems with creative solutions. Politicians intone “creative” with the solemnity they once reserved for such terms as “freedom” and “family.” It is a bipartisan bromide: In his November 2016 victory speech, Donald Trump promised to “harness the creative talents of our people.” Two months later, in his farewell address, Barack Obama hailed “this generation coming up — unselfish, altruistic, creative.”

“Creative” is a fixture of the self-help industry, touted as a secret to success and a key to enlightenment on podcasts and websites and in books like “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.” And in recent years, creative has made a grammatical migration, crossing over from adjective to noun. A creative is a kind of worker, or rather many kinds of workers — a catchall that takes in web coders, graphic designers, copywriters, actors, painters, D.J.s, cocktail mixologists, Instagram influencers and all the rest of the culture-and-information-industry professionals that the sociologist Richard Florida famously called “the creative class.” Creative is not just an attribute. It is an identity.