Apparently these days, the most popular dream job among children is influencer. I’ve seen articles about it, and both the articles and the comments are invariably full of judgy statements about how Kids These DaysTM are such narcissists/their brains are being rotted by social media/they don’t want to do anything valuable with their lives.
But like. I think the kids are onto something, tbh. The thing is, working a 9-5 (or 8-5, as the average job is nowadays) job is a pretty shit deal. You have no say in your work environment and have to do whatever you’re told. The hours make a medieval peasant’s workload look light, and that’s not even counting the commute you’ll likely have to make. What little free time you have left over is spent recovering, so you don’t have time to do anything fun. And you get to do this for the rest of your life.
At least if you’re an influencer, you set your own hours and may wind up working much less than 40 hours a week. You get to work from home, and there’s a small chance you’ll hit it big and get rich. There’s zero chance of that at your standard office job. If you can swing it, it’s not a bad deal at all.
And I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with being an influencer. Are some of them shitty? Sure. But that’s true of any job. You could argue that being an influencer contributes nothing to society, but really, how many jobs do contribute anything worthwhile to the world? Is it really more respectable to type numbers into spreadsheets all day just to make your boss richer? Or to write up reports no one reads? At least influencers entertain people.
TL;DR: The kids know the grind is bullshit, and they see becoming an influencer as a way to escape that.
Mean to me it feels like when this gets brought up in an article, its another one of those moral panic sort of things that go “look at what the kids want to be when they grow up, society is in decline!” as if they didn’t have dreams of being a movie star or something when they were young. I wanted to be a astronaut despite my fear of going on rollercoasters lol, kids love dreaming big regardless of how actually feasible those dreams are.
And I can see why being an influencer would be appealing, getting to feel cool and popular, the perks that come with it like free stuff, having it revolve around an area they are passionate in like gaming for example. Plus considering that to those kids who might be inspired to become an influencer from following one, they’ve probably also gotten the sense that it must be one of the best jobs ever since they’ve probably only gotten to see the good, fun, positive sides of the job as thats usually the stuff that gets posted, but not so much with the bad side of it. Burning out is a fairly common problem for one, especially with a big pressure to keep pumping out content super regularly.
Personally not for me though, the idea of fame just doesn’t appeal at all to someone scared of people like me and I’m burnt out enough as is haha.