The life of an influencer in 2023

“I still cringe about the thought of my friends watching it, and I'm sure they cringe watching it,” Jodie Rogers says.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Before we start: I interviewed the cringe king of TikTok, Jake Novak, for GQ! —Kate 

---

In 2019, Twitter users bemoaned a recent poll that revealed that today’s children are more likely to want to become a YouTuber, a job which can be done in one’s living room, than an astronaut, which is done without oxygen. Clearly, I find the end-of-days sentiment that tends to accompany the sharing of this information deeply exhausting. The dismissal of influencing as a career is often based on a misconception of what it actually is and why someone would be drawn to it. 

This is why I wanted to speak with

Jodie Melissa Rogers

. She’s a yoga teacher and slow-living content creator across Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Substack who also happens to be in the early stages of her career. I first discovered her on TikTok, which sent me to her YouTube channel, where I was surprised to find I was among her first couple thousand subscribers. She’s been posting on social media since 2013, but it was only after leaving her marketing career behind last November that she officially began calling herself a creator. 

“I feel like I'm in a massive self-discovery phase and I'm still trying to figure it all out,” she tells me over Zoom. 

In Jodie’s videos, she’s candid about the highs and lows of becoming a content creator in 2023, which looks wildly different from how today’s established influencers got started. Influencing is an industry now, one that fills every platform, which presents both advantages and challenges for those looking to break in.

In this conversation for paid subscribers, Jodie and I chat about the awkwardness of getting started online, resources that have helped her overcome comparison, and why 2023 is not too late for anyone to start their content creator journey.

This is such an interesting year to become a content creator because it's very normalized, which is great. That also means that it's a really saturated market. So many people that we follow, their story is the same. They're like, “I started posting videos and then this career materialized and no one knew about it yet.” But now we know about it. How has that played a role in your own journey? Do you think it's made it easier or more complicated?