WEDNESDAY READER | MARCH 15

Have you heard about the trend of deinfluencing?

First, let’s assume you know about influencing.  People with online audiences recommend products, vacations, restaurants and anything con$umable, sometimes for money or gifts.  Yes, I am describing advertising, but the vibes are different when social media enters the fray.  A social influencer is someone we like to follow, who has gained our trust and whose recommendations we take seriously.

I’m a perfect mark!  A late-30s woman with a little disposable income, plugged into the internet simultaneously confronted with the woeful realities of aging.  I am doomed.  Just ask the too-long flare yoga pants in my closet I keep threatening to hem.  Ask the neutral boho top that looked cool on the influencer but like a literal bowl of Quaker instant oats on me.  Ask the strawberry kefir chia pudding in my fridge.  Ask the 68-pound Revlon drying brush I’ve used three times in three years.  Ask my Rare Beauty cream blush, a current influencer staple, which I actually like very much.  ASK MY PILLOW SLIDES.

However, this blind susceptibility to commerce is not sustainable.  Why do I need four different lip glosses in the same shade of nude?  Why do I believe every new hair tool will give me a transformed head?  Enter deinfluencing, the practice of TikTockers sharing viral products they actually don’t like.  Here’s a bit from Time:

“The growing trend is a direct response to the endless deluge of products that beauty and lifestyle influencers insist you simply must have.  Accddording to the internet, at the moment, you should own a Stanley Cup drink tumbler, an ice roller for your face, shapewear from Kim Karashian’s SKIMS line and some tinned fish in your kitchen cupboard.  These are subject to change next month, or next week — depending on the trends.”

Brands must be quaking a little, and I like this.  I like it a lot.  I think we can extend this practice well beyond beauty and lifestyle products.  Plenty of life experiences also need deinfluencing.

For starters, I would like to deinfluence funny animal yoga.

Have you ever done goat yoga?  It is exactly as it sounds:  yoga in the presence of goats.  I did it in Nashville and can boldly say that it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever attempted.  Goat flow might have been more idyllic in a pasture, but this was a glorified garage with the door rolled up for airflow.  The goats peed and pooped all over our yoga mats.  Getting into the actual yoga positions or a flowy state of mind was impossible because, as mentioned, GOATS WERE DEFECATING ON US.  The goats did not want to be there.  The people, by the end, did not to be there.  This not about yoga, nor goats.  This was about a photo op, and yes, I did get mine.  It was not worth it.

Speaking of photo ops, let’s deinfluence whimsical neon signs, which will soon be a dreadful remnant of 2020s urban center monoculture.  I am done posing in a tapas restaurant bathroom under pink tube lighting that spells “YOU GLOW GIRL.”  I am done pretending I just happened to take a candid photo under an effulgent blue cafe sign that says, “BUT FIRST COFFEE.”  Yes, there should be a comma in both of these expressions, but neon signs never have correct punctuation!

While we’re at it, let’s deinfluence day-in-the-life-videos.  I don’t believe for a second that someone set up her phone on a tripod and let it roll all night so she could hop out of bed in full makeup and yawn cutely at the true hour of her waking.  She recreated that!  Which is fine, just say it!  How do influencers with kids do this?  Do they just set the camera up just to corral the kids into shoes and the car, only to go back into the house with the children, take the camera down and usher the kids back in the car?  Or do they leave the kids in the car while they dismantle the filming materials?

I guess let’s just deinfluence doing things just for the sake of a photo.  Photos are great, witnessing little insights into a mundane day.  There’s real connection in that.  But there has to be a more abiding reason for participating in an activity other than just the photo, right?  There has to be a reason to buy the Stanley tumbler other than the fact that everyone else has the Stanley tumbler.  Next time we make plans, let’s ask ourselves:  If my phone fell into a burning ring of fire and no one on Earth knew what I was up to, would I still go to goat yoga?  I think I know the answer.

~  Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida.  Follow her at @stephayes on Twitter or @stephrhayes on Instagram.  COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM
published on February 18, 2023