Influencers have – in a way that is largely unintentional on their part – poisoned my brain.
It’s a large claim to make, and I am in no way pulling my knives out for said influencers when I’m making it. Influencer culture has, simply, permeated my generation, and with it, my own life – I can hardly go a day without comparing myself to a girl that I’ve seen holidaying in Australia on TikTok. It seems to me that this girl’s job is holidaying in Australia; she is getting flown out by brands to run haphazardly in a £300 Reformation bikini set on Bondi Beach and I, who cannot afford the heating in my Edinburgh flat, am green-eyed with envy.
Perhaps it’s the fact that I see so little that is making me so jealous. I am scrolling, and my eyes are met with girls too good to be true on all-expenses-paid holidays to places that I cannot reach. Maybe it’s the fact that my brain tricks me into thinking that the stencil outlines social media provides of someone’s humanity are representative of the subject’s entire being. To my eyes, it seems like every day until they die, these influencers will lie in, wake up in a penthouse flat, get room service, post a couple of TikToks and go out to dinner with their friends. I am seething, because I would give anything for what they have. I would give anything for my entire being to look like that.
I am not the only person to feel this way; I know that for a fact. I am surrounded daily by people that criticise influencers, and I know that they’re coming from a similar place to me – we are both obscenely jealous. We make brazen comments that ‘if we wanted to, we could have that life,’ and then go on with our day doing nothing about it. I think this is a primary reason that influencers garner popularity in the first place – they are usually not aspirational at the time of posting their very first video; they are relatable. You could be them.
Take Olivia Neill: she got famous as a teenager living in Belfast, posting YouTube videos in her bedroom wherein she often got ready for houseparties and got a bit tipsy. She was candid and familiar; even if you didn’t relate to her, you knew somebody who could. At the start, when something good happened to Olivia, you wanted it to happen, because it felt like it was happening to you, too. That it could happen to you. Then, Olivia moved to London; she garnered a gaggle of celebrity friends; she got an invite to London Fashion Week; she stopped posting on YouTube. It felt like betrayal. This was no longer your parasocial best friend – this felt like a complete stranger. You could no longer see the rough edges that made her so personable; you could only see what felt like a pencil sketch of a human being.
Every flaw that endeared you to this person had now been, in your eyes, resolved: they wanted out of their small town, to move to a big city, to do social media as a career. All of that has happened, but you feel left behind – there’s nobody left to root for, now. The story is over; they have it all and you are in the same bedroom as you were when you began watching them. It seems as though their life is perfect, and yours is not. You know that every human being spends at least 25 per cent of their time feeling like shit, but this influencer is not advertising this to you anymore. They have – at least to you – sacrificed their humanity for perfection. Thus, you resent them.
The influencer lifestyle comes with benefits. Of course it does – tickets to brand trips, invites to award shows, invaluable connections. But it also comes at the price of the dissection of your character by millions of prying eyes, much like my own, writing this article. It comes with exposure to a myriad of people who can, legally, say whatever they would like about you. My opinions on influencers are nuanced and many: do I think that they should be earning more than, say, doctors do? Absolutely not. I’m not going to lie and say that I think the pay, the gifts, and the opportunities are not extortionate. However, I do believe that we should stop holding people that we don’t know to such impossible standards. If you align yourself with a trajectory that the viewer doesn’t like, they’ll chase after you with a virtual pitchfork. They do not afford you space to evolve if they haven’t found that space for themselves. How exhausting must it be to have to cater to every single one of these people for a living?
Perhaps we should all log off, or at least stop pretending that the online world is in any way representative of the real one. Perhaps we should let these people who have fallen into these unfamiliar, contemporary professions work it out for themselves. Perhaps we should get some rest.