It's OK for influencers to complain about their jobs
But maybe not publicly.
Honestly, this entire controversy could be summed up by this sketch. —Kate
The work of an influencer is, among other things, to make their life appear as aspirational as possible, so their followers will buy the products they recommend in hopes of emulating that life. And, because nobody wants to work, an aspirational life involves a lot of fuck-all. It’s going to events, getting beauty treatments, decorating apartments, showing off their new clothes. It’s looking like you’re never stressed, never uncomfortable, and never uncoiffed. An influencer who does a good job will appear as if they do not work at all—so when they complain about the work that goes into maintaining that facade, it tends not to land well.
An influencer named Mikayla Nogueira became the Tara Lynn of this week after remarks she made over a year ago were taken out of context and shared on TikTok. I say taken out of context because her original TikTok was in response to a comment telling the 24-year-old creator to go work a nine-to-five.
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“Every single day, I get up at 6 a.m. I spend about five to six hours filming video content that ranges from three to four videos and then I spent a few hours editing that video content,” she says. “Then I have to work on my other social media profiles, whatever it may be.”
Then she says the words that have since spread all over TikTok: “I just finished working, it’s 5:19. Try being an influencer for a day. Try it.”
Her response—perhaps ill-advised, but understandable—was simply an effort to explain that her job as an influencer was, in fact, a job. But given that the subject of influencers and work is a touchy one on the app these days, her particularly snappy parting words (Try it) were fuel for an already heated mob.
If being an influencer really was as easy as it appears, we would all be doing it. But the barriers—class and race and appearance, but also the skills required for community-building, creating, networking, and withstanding public attention and pressure—mean that very few of us are. Influencing is a job, one that people try and fail at because it can be hard and draining for many reasons. Your income is unstable. You could, say, stumble into a backlash. But also: There are much harder jobs out there.
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I can have legitimate gripes about a job sitting in front of a computer all day, and share them with my friends who also sit in front of computers all day. I’m not going to share them with the person who runs my local laundromat or makes me coffee.
But when you’re an influencer with a large audience and you complain to that audience, you’re speaking to laundromat workers and baristas and cashiers and dog-walkers and cleaners and teachers and people with thousands of other professions. A not-insignificant number of those professions will be harder than yours.
I don’t agree that the answer to that inequality is telling influencers to also get jobs that are physically draining, financially inadequate, and even dehumanizing. We should not promote the idea that we are only worthwhile if we are exploited for our labor. But without an immediate answer for how to fix a problem as big as class and labor in the United States, taking all that frustration out on an easy target might seem like the next best thing.
So I feel for those who are angry, and I feel for Mikayla. Influencing is indeed, in many ways, a hard job. Perhaps the hardest part is grinning and bearing it.
