Going Back To A 9-5 Job After Social Media Influencing: End of an Era?
I never thought I would witness the rise and fall of the social media influencer life. Content creators on TikTok are now opening up about their decision to leave behind social media influencing and go back to traditional 9-to-5 jobs.
This is an extremely surprising turn of events after years of glorifying the social media / content creation as the dream career and patronizing it as a life of freedom
This year the influencers economy reached its peak at a staggering $24 billion , up from $1.7 billion in 2016.
Approximately the same year when modern day influencer marketing kicked off as the number of Instagram influencers rapidly grew, and just as fast it became the dream job for many young adults, particularly teenage girls.
According to a 2023 survey conducted by Junior Achievement US in collaboration with EY, 76% of teenagers (between the ages 13 to 17 years old) showed interest in entrepreneurship, with the highest reported career path being social media influencing / content creation while the least was professional careers such as engineering, education, and healthcare.
See, unlike traditional celebrities, these social media influencers started as regular people one day, indicating the high potential for anyone to become the next big influencer, which made the career even more alluring, besides implied excellent income and a flexible working schedule.
In fact, teenagers who follow influencers on social media are more interested to pursue this career path than their peers. So, many people wanted to catch up and start making content, grow their audience and start monetizing their platforms.
Instagram first introduced its Shop Now feature to photo feed in 2013, when loyal followers started to pay attention to what products their favorite online personalities owned as they shared daily content of their lives.
Making advertisement easier than ever by seamlessly connecting brands with these personalities and having massive access their target audiences.
‘I soon felt like a billboard’
Shares ex-wellness influencer Lee Tilghman during an interview with NBC. An influencer that some think still profits off of being an influencer, but that’s a story for another day.
Similar to other career trends on social media: quiet quitting, lazy girl job and 5-to-9 life, quitting social media influencing and going back to the traditional workforce started to get some attention.
Besides the obvious reasons that a person did not have a successful career as a social media influencer, some say that they began to strive for the predictability of a 9-to-5 daily routine. Where your work ends at 5 pm as opposed to the blurred boundaries between work and life as a full-time influencer.
Seriously, who would've thought that a traditional full-time job got more work-life balance than being an influencer?
Income inconsistency was a major issue, too. Because of its per-project nature, income can be very unpredictable and inconsistent when working as an influencer. Also, the lack of health insurance and a 401K plan seemed to be among the challenges faced by some content creators.
Others have shared a very interesting opinion as they point out that spending your entire day opening up packages, putting on makeup, and taking pictures of your ootd ‘eats’ away at your brain cells, making you superficial and materialistic.
Essentially implying that when you’re not being intellectually challenged or engaged in what’s socially defined to be an intelligent domain (STEM fields, for example) you start to become less intelligent over time.
Personally, I think it’s just normal to switch careers, and that realistic career coaches were right about this:
You do not have to follow your passion in order to find a fulfilling job.
A job will always remain a job. And you will eventually get bored and begin to embark on your next quest of finding your Passion.
As someone who switched industries multiple times, my all-time sincere advice is to find a job that resonates with your values and one that you can tolerate..
