If Your Life Coach Is an Influencer, Please Advance to the Next Podcast
Image by Art-x A.I artxai from Pixabay
I admit it. I don’t get influencers. Maybe I’m just too old to know what’s hip and cool, but the idea of letting influencers direct my every decision seems a bit…risky. But you know what? I get that my opinion only matters to me. I get that I’m a late-middle-aged guy whose last chance at influencing anyone walked out the door with my youngest daughter on the day she decided to strike out on her own.
Show Me the Money
What’s so absurd about the whole influencer thing is the obscene amounts of money being made by pretty faces who just happen to know how to use a smartphone to make videos. Take Buffy the Travel Maven. Buffy’s IQ is somewhere in the neighborhood of a wet paper towel (not Bounty, of course; the quicker picker upper is way smarter) yet she pulls down six figures for smiling while pointing to a tourist trap in the distance.
Then there’s Billy the Beefcake. He makes his money walking around in designer sneakers while flashing the shaka sign with all the discretion of my uncle Harold approaching the buffet line on a cruise ship. And yet people love Mr. Beefcake. It’s as amazing as it is terrifying.
“Terrifying,” you ask? Heck, yeah. The same people whose life coaches are Buffy and Billy will someday rule the world. It will be a world of silicone, steroids, and AI-enhanced videos that blow up the line between reality and whatever the heck these influencers are trying to pass off as legit.
I’m Not Bitter
Do I sound bitter here? I’ve been accused of not liking Heidi Homesteader and Jake ‘the Jock’ Johnson only because they make more than me – a LOT more, by the way. But I’m not bitter. Perhaps a little salty from time to time, but I have completely let go of all the bitterness thanks to six months of videos from my hero, Dr. Hermey the Elf, DDS.
Dr. Hermey’s not a psychologist or therapist. He’s a dentist. Actually, he’s not even a dentist. He’s a made-up schlepp from a 1964 claymation Christmas special featuring Santa, Rudolph, and some crazy guy who runs a dog sled with pooches who couldn’t pull a salad bowl through a puddle of olive oil if they tried.
But so what? Hermey is just as influential, and real I might add, as Buffy, Billy, et al. By the way, ‘et al’ is Latin for ‘a cool but meaningless phrase that we can stick on the end of a list that includes the Oxford comma.’ Impressed? I’m not. I learned that from Ed the Wordmeister and his daily wordsmith podcast.
I Don’t Understand That, Either
Speaking of podcasts, I don’t understand that little gem either. What makes a podcast a podcast as opposed to, let’s say, a video showing people sitting around giving their unsolicited opinions on things that make their little hearts flutter like so many teen girls at a Taylor Swift concert? I don’t get it. I’m sorry if that makes me out of touch.
I guess what I really want to know is how all of these people whose careers consist of little more than making videos capable of attracting advertising dollars get away with it. I’m not angry here. I’m not saying they should be banned from the internet – although some of them should be, for reasons completely unrelated to the fact that their brains could explode at any minute, potentially exposing millions of impressionable kids to images they will never unsee.
No my friends, I just want my piece of the pie. If Buffy can make millions with her fake smile (and other fake body parts) and semi-lucid explanations of where she has recently traveled to, surely I can do adequately well producing meaningful videos. Or can I?
I don’t know the answer to that question. Perhaps I need to spend a few more decades watching videos from influencers who can show me how it’s done.
