Recently someone shared a Harper’s story with me that was published last year, entitled “The Anxiety of Influencers” by Barrett Swanson.
The gist of the essay is this: Swanson, a writer and professor, takes a Didion-like approach to profiling members of the TikTok “clubhouses” of Los Angeles. Swanson is equal parts attracted and repulsed by young Gen Z influencers who are paid to live in large, lavish mansions while pumping out social media content. Many of these influencers drop out of university, forego scholarships, or buy into the idea of creating sponsored content for social media as both a profession and a lifestyle.
The subject and approach are interesting enough, particularly against the backdrop of 2020’s apocalyptic feel. But what gave me pause while reading—or, more honestly, made me laugh—was Swanson’s own out-of-touch understanding of what anxiety was in his subjects as well as his own students:
As someone who suffers from Churchillian spells of depression, it was easy for me to connect this to the pervasive disquiet on campus. In the past ten years, my email correspondence has been increasingly given over to calming down students who are hyperventilating with anxiety—about grades, about their potential marketability, about their Instagram followings. The previous semester, for instance, during a class on creative non-fiction, twenty-four of my twenty-six students wrote about self-harm or suicidal ideation. Several of them had been hospitalized for anxiety or depression, and my office hours were now less occasions to discuss course concepts—James Baldwin’s narrative persona, say, or Joan Didion’s use of imagery—than they were de facto counseling sessions. Even students who seemed happy and neurologically stable—Abercrombie-clad, toting a pencil case and immaculate planner—nevertheless displayed unsettling in-class behavior: snacking incessantly during lectures, showing Victorian levels of repression. The number of emotional-support service animals had skyrocketed on campus. It seemed like every third person had a Fido in tow, and had you wandered into my lecture hall when we were still holding in-person classes, you might have assumed that my lessons were on obedience training or the virtues of dog-park etiquette. And while it seems clichéd even to mention it, the students were inexorably—compulsively—on their phones.
I’m not here to rail against Swanson for sounding, as the kids say, “cheugy,” although it’s hard not to roll your eyes at this passage (Victorian levels of repression! Fido! De facto counseling! Dog-park etiquette!). And he’s not wrong in pointing out the many absurdities, dangers, and ethical considerations that come along with the rise of the influencer industry.
What I’m here to ask for is perhaps—crazy as it sounds—is some disobedience training. That is, some empathy for perhaps how and why more students are expressing their anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation rather than merely commenting on the generational differences of those he deems “neurologically stable” (whoever allowed this phrase to end up in the final essay: why?).
I’m not a member of Gen Z and I won’t pretend to speak for a generation I’m not a part of. But I, too, teach college students of this same generation. I too have had student meetings that felt like “de facto counseling sessions.” Students have written about the darkest times in their life as a part of their academic writing assignments even when I did not ask them to.
But I don’t think they are inherently neurologically unstable for being honest and asking for what they need. I don’t think that their desire for, and decision to try, being a professional influencer is a bad one or even all that baffling.
It should also not be a huge surprise that Gen Z is anxious. Consider the formative times in their lives thus far: the Great Recession and the jobless recovery; the rise (and stagnation) of grind culture; the boom-and-bust of start-up culture; the election of President Donald Trump (arguably himself a poorly-behaved social media influencer); QAnon and conspiracy theories proliferating on the internet; climate change; school shootings; the #MeToo movement; the growing wage gap and disintegration of the middle class; and more I’m likely unaware of.
Of course they are anxious. That’s a lot to worry about and hold, particularly when all of these crises and issues are in direct contrast to what many of us were told growing up in every generation: work hard enough and you can be anything you want to be. You can succeed. The American Dream, or something like it.
But the American Dream is, as many have discovered, a myth. Or perhaps an outdated idea, one that worked for some (hint: white) ancestors. Every generation is attracted towards the shiny, seemingly easy money and risks looking silly to older folks. That part of his reporting is the far less interesting component of Swanson’s work.
In other words: how callous, to know how vulnerable young adults of this age can be, and increasingly so, but to still publish this anyway just to seem like an old person who can hang with the young ones. I too have written about, and researched, the rise of influencer culture for years now. It’s a strange world and business, a bizarre way of sharing your life and promoting yourself as something a brand wants to attach itself to, for better or for worse. There’s plenty here to mine, but I’m not sure judging the anxiety of a younger generation is the right way to in to this subject matter.
A profile is meant to expose the tension between the subject of the profile and how they view themselves versus how the world views them. So Swanson has every right to point out the many dissonances within TikTok influencer culture, the pitfalls and excesses, the micro and macrocosms of the American economy.
And I’m not here to say these young people aren’t being exploited: I’d argue they likely are, perhaps even worse than we might imagine. But I still think it’s possible to try to put yourself in the shoes of someone younger, or at least try to, to see what might worries that person and what might perpetuate the fear that motivates them.
Around the time Swanson’s essay was published, I made my dog an Instagram account. Very 2014, I know, but I joked to friends that maybe if the account went viral and he got a big following I could turn my photos of him into a passive revenue stream. Take a picture, post it, cha-ching. Really, this is a very cynical and exploitative look at it, even if most if not all of my dog’s couple dozen followers are friends or family members. I haven’t put real effort into promoting the account, and I likely never will. But the dream of a simple, uncomplicated, wholesome way to make money, gain popularity, and open career doors down the line is a seductive one, particularly during my final year of my MFA.
But I’ll tell you why I joked about “passive” revenue. If my dog’s Instagram actually went viral and attracted sponsored content, nothing about that is actually passive, it’s just promising. It’s monetizing something I’m already doing. It’s the hope that someone, anyone, will see glimpses of my life, however small it might be, as something compelling and worth subsidizing. That restricts me, particularly if I want the algorithm to spread my photos to a wide audience, but it also promises potential prosperity in a world that feels less and less built for individual success. I just graduated from graduate school, and the idea of something I’m already doing being not only likable but profitable is hard to resist, even if I know it reduces my own beloved dog to a product. While I am not proud of this, I am willing to admit it. My life as content and a means to success? Sure, why not?
And when I, as a near-elder millennial, scroll through TikTok, I can see how I have aged out of certain trends, certain opportunities and paths. But then again I did this as teenagers too, on LiveJournal and Tumblr and blogs and early social media. We all broadcasted ourselves: likely, some Gen Z’ers saw this, internalized it, and built upon it. Dancing on camera, crying, pulling pranks and stunts, lip-syncing, cooking, eating, exercising, traveling, therapy—if they were already doing it in private, if they were already anxious about the future, why not showcase it? Why not be honest and upfront? No one wants to be a product, but everyone wants success even when there is a high cost.
If we know we’re a product but we can secure a future for ourselves, wouldn’t many of us share parts of ourselves we might not otherwise?
I say this not in praise of corporations and social media companies and influencers necessarily. I just think we can perhaps be less critical of folks younger than ourselves who are honest about their emotions and their desires and their worries.
It strikes me that Swanson is surprised that, in a creative nonfiction class, students wrote about self-harm. Certainly a large number of students are writing about the topic, but what prompted this? What was the assignment, what objects of emulation did you provide for them? Why is it that this group of students is so interested in experiences and language regarding self-harm?
Put another way: why is this professor so uncomfortable with students telling him what they feel and what they need, pursuing something that, at least in theory, puts themselves first, not terribly unlike an influencer? Academia has never been fully objective—what we study is always tied in with who we are, no matter what discipline they are in. Creative writing is perhaps the most transparent of the disciplines in that regard.
So when my students write about themselves and their feelings, it feels radically honest to me, more self-aware than most. What a privilege that I might be there as they learn about themselves and the world. I’m not a counselor or therapist, and I’m very honest about that , but if their growth as a student is linked to their growth as a person—chock full of messy emotions and desires and fears and ambitions—then I’m willing to listen.
What I’m interested in more than anything is Swanson’s inability to fully put himself in his subjects and students’ shoes. He remarks upon the naive and immature comments of a group of TikTok influencer college-age boys he follows called the Clubhouse For the Boys (aka Clubhouse FTB), but never asks why they feel this is their best path forward for them. I’d ask one of the many influencers profiled what about this job felt more secure than a full-ride scholarship, whether they feel higher education cannot serve them, and how they grew up to think about jobs or money.
The tone of this piece is paternalistic at best and patronizing at worst, even when Swanson drags the publicists in charge of these houses for not doing better media training or protection of these boys in Clubhouse FTB (even as he himself chooses to publish some of their less-than-flattering moments).
I think it’s possible to be critical while also empathetic, or at the very least a little bit more compassionate. So moving forward though, if you’re looking for me, I’ll still be trying to master many of the dances mentioned in this article from a year ago (basically a decade in TikTok time).