Glory and Glamor

"A millennial who tried van life says it's just 'glorified homelessness'." Put another way, a millennial who attempted to follow in the footsteps of "influencers" learned that part of the work of being an influencer is hiding all of the effort that goes into maintaining their perfect Internet lifestyles. One of the headings in the Fortune article is "Lifestyle content isn’t everything it seems to be when you’re actually living it," something that I, for my part, took for granted. Mainly because I'd always figured it was a given that the messy part of life was rarely shown, because pretty much no-one aspires to it. And aspiration, and supposed shortcuts to achieving it, is the entire point of Internet lifestyle content.

But I suppose that's easy for me to say. After all, I'm 20 years older than the woman in the article. I've had significantly more time to develop media literacy and, having watched how social media came onto the scene, a skepticism that it was any more genuine than television (reality or not) had been.

Lifestyle content, and its predecessors in the media landscape, has always sought to tap into the audience's feelings that they could be living a better life than the one they currently are. And it's an understandable feeling. While I find the constant descriptors of everyday life as a "dystopian hellscape" tiresome and self-important (not to mention clichéd), I completely understand the generalized feeling that things should be better that underlies it. And so when people appear to offer straightforward ways of attaining a better life, it's perfectly reasonable that certain members of the audience would jump at the chance. It's no different than any other form of advertising; offering solutions to problems that require little more than a reasonable monthly payment.

There was a part of me, when I was younger, that believed, because I wanted to believe, that there were people who had found a way to make it without playing the game by the rules that had been set out for everyone to play by. I suspect that if there had been influencer culture when I was in my 20s, that I would have latched on to them as people living the dream, and sought to follow in their footsteps. Now, I know better... or am at least more suspicious of the sorts of quick fixes that the lifestyles of the glamorous seem to offer. (After all, I'm well aware that "glamor" originally meant "a magical spell or illusion.") But that also makes me cynical, and while I've come to enjoy that aspect of my personality, I understand that it isn't for everyone. Some people want to believe that the people they see on Instagram or TikTok are genuinely letting them in on ways to escape parts of their lives that don't work for them. And it's something of a shame that they come to feel that they've been on the wrong end of deliberate deceit. But I suppose that advertising has that effect on a lot of people, eventually.