There is a girl on my ForYou Page who is 16 years old. She has perfect glowing skin, perfect curls in her hair, and a perfect bedroom that looks like it belongs in a Pinterest board. She posts a video of herself doing her morning routine, and within hours, a million people have watched it. Among those million people are hundreds of thousands of teenagers who look at their own morning routine and feel inadequate. Their skin is not perfect. Their hair is not perfect. Their bedroom has dirty laundry on the floor. And without meaning to, without even trying, that sixteen-year-old girl has made them feel smaller.
She did nothing wrong. She just lived her life on camera. But that is the problem.
Influencers did not invent insecurity. Teenagers have always compared themselves to each other, to magazine covers, to movie stars. But there is something different about the way influencers affect Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Magazine covers were obviously fake. Everyone knew the photos were airbrushed. The models were adults, often in their twenties and thirties. There was a distance. There was awareness that it was not real life.
Influencers look like real life. They talk to you like a friend. They film in their actual homes. They show you what they eat for breakfast. The whole appeal is authenticity. And that is exactly what makes them dangerous. Because when a girl who looks like she could be your classmate has a body that never seems to change and a life that never seems to fall apart, the comparison is not aspirational. It is crushing.
The worst part is that most influencers do not mean to cause this. They are not villains. They are just people, mostly young people, who figured out how to make money by being watched. They post a photo of themselves at the beach. They are just trying to get likes. But the effect is the same, regardless of the intention. Harm does not require intent. We pour our insecurities onto these people, but we also treat them like they are not people at all.
Scroll through the comments on any popular influencer’s video. You will see worship. You will also see cruelty. People call them “pick me,” desperate, washed up, fake. They analyze their faces. They zoom in on a split second screenshot to prove the influencer got work done. They demand explanations for every change in appearance, every relationship, every absence. We have decided that because these people chose to be public, they have forfeited the right to privacy. To being treated like a human being who might read those comments and feel hurt.
Think about how strange that is. We criticize influencers for being fake, but we also demand that they perform perfection constantly. We say they are out of touch, but we also obsess over every detail of their lives. We blame them for making us insecure, and then we turn around and rip them apart for having a bad angle in a selfie. We are participants in the same game we claim to hate. Maybe the real question is not whether influencers are good or bad. Maybe it is whether we should be pushing people into this kind of fame at all.
A kid posts a funny video. It gets millions of views. Suddenly they’re a celebrity. They are fourteen years old and their faces are everywhere. They have brand deals. They have managers. They have a schedule of content to produce. They have millions of people watching their every move. But they are still a child. They do not have the brain development to handle what is happening to them. But the internet does not care about brain development. The internet cares about engagement.
We have built a system that rewards popularity above all else. We have decided that the highest achievement for a young person is to be seen by as many people as possible. But we have not asked whether that is good for them. We have not asked whether it is good for us. We just keep scrolling, watching, comparing. A continuous cycle.
The solution is not to cancel or blame influencers. The solution is to recognize that this whole system is broken and we are all a part of it. The influencers, the audience, and the algorithms. We are trapped in a loop where attention is profit and humans are the product.
We need to stop treating popularity as the goal. We need to stop pushing every stereotypically attractive teenager into the spotlight. Maybe we need to remember that the people on our screens are not characters. They are real humans who get tired, sad, lonely, and who read the comments and sometimes cry. And maybe we need to look at our own reflection and ask why we continue watching.