Influencers: Just the Word makes me Shudder

“Hey guys, just jumping on here…”

You can almost hear the whiney voice…  Hell, they’ve been “jumping on here” for six years. We get it!

Influencing is the only job where doing nothing somehow looks exhausting. Every post comes with a sigh, a story, a quiet explanation about how busy things have been lately, and yet from the outside it’s mostly the same cycle repeating itself. Wake up, film yourself, talk about it, and then explain how hard it is to keep up. No one is saying it’s zero effort. It’s just not what it’s being sold as. Especially when you consider they’ve done thousands of photos to capture that one shot.

Everything becomes content. Breakfast, a walk, a bad day, even taking a break gets packaged, explained, and turned into something that still feeds the algorithm. At some point, it stops being life and starts being management. You’re not just living anymore, you’re curating, constantly aware of how everything looks and whether it’s worth posting.

Then there’s the voice. That calm, slightly breathy tone that suggests something meaningful is about to be shared, when in reality it’s usually a product you “absolutely love right now,” which conveniently didn’t exist last week and won’t be mentioned again next week. It’s not recommendation. It’s rotation.

The relatability angle is where it really stretches. “I’m just like you.”

No, you’re not. You’re filming yourself being relatable under good lighting, with multiple takes and a clear sense of what will land. That’s not real life. That’s performance dressed up as honesty.

And it never stops. There’s no off switch, because everything has potential value. A normal moment can’t just be a normal moment anymore. It has to be captured, framed, edited, and shared, otherwise it feels like it didn’t count.

And maybe that’s the real issue. Not that influencing exists, but that so much of it is empty and still treated like it’s important…