Influenced: The Success 'Aesthetic'

When did success gain an aesthetic?

After spending three years as a paralegal, Lucie Blackburn, 22, is now completing a solicitor apprenticeship in clinical negligence, working towards the career she has wanted since she was younger.

Qualifying will take years of training and hard work, and she knows exactly how much that achievement will mean to her.

Yet even with a clear career path of her own, social media has managed to move the goalposts.

“When I was younger, I was very driven to become a solicitor and that was always what I wanted to do,”

“Back then, I thought being successful meant having a good career, owning a house and being financially comfortable.”

Then came the endless window into other people's lives.

“You constantly see people having multiple holidays a year, huge houses, expensive cars and very luxurious lifestyles.

When that's what you're seeing online every day, a normal comfortable life can almost start to feel like it isn't enough.”

Lucie eventually deleted TikTok after becoming frustrated with the endless scrolling and what she describes as the unrealistic ideas circulating on the platform. She has no plans to trade legal briefs for brand briefs either; privacy matters to her, as does knowing the career she is building has some longevity.

“I've always wanted to become a solicitor, and I like that it's challenging,” she says. “When I eventually qualify, I'll see that as a massive personal achievement because it's something I've worked towards for such a long time.”

The influencer lifestyle hasn't made Lucie want to switch pathways. Instead, it has done something arguably more subtle - changed the lifestyle against which she measures her own success.

The internet loves to tell us anyone can make it. Dr Zari Taylor says the starting line was never quite that equal.

Dr Zari Taylor, scholar and assistant professor at New York University, has spent years studying digital culture, creator economies and the experiences of black women online, and she traces much of today's creator aspiration back to the moment TikTok exploded during the pandemic.

At a time of unemployment, economic uncertainty and hybrid work, users weren't simply watching creators anymore; they could watch ordinary people go viral and seemingly transform their lives in real time.

“When teenagers saw people like Charli D'Amelio and Addison Rae blow up on TikTok, dance online, get huge commercial deals and move to LA, I can imagine young women watching that and thinking, ‘Well, she can do that, I can do the same thing.’”

Pair that promise with growing dissatisfaction around traditional employment and the comparison becomes even harder to resist.

“If you're struggling in a nine-to-five and you see influencers on a brand trip in Barbados, you think, ‘Well, why am I not doing that?’”

But the idea that everybody begins with the same phone and the same chance of success is, Taylor argues, one of influencer culture's biggest illusions.

“Platforms also make it seem as though anyone can go viral: just pick up your phone, post and be yourself. But that's not true.”

Taylor's research examines how race, gender, beauty and economic privilege shape creator opportunities, but that this can also lead to creators being pigeonholed into particular sectors, overlooked for wider campaigns or offered less money.

There is also a gendered contradiction at the heart of it. Taylor points out that hugely successful male creators can graduate into being described as entrepreneurs or businessmen, while women achieving similar levels of commercial success often remain simply influencers.

Because influencing is so feminised, she says, the work behind it is easily dismissed: she's pretty -> she puts a camera up -> she gets paid.