For most of us, the era of blind trust in social media is over.
We pride ourselves in thinking nothing on the internet can fool us anymore, we are aware of ads and scams, and we navigate the web more consciously than we used to. However, the ‘net always seems to be one step ahead in finding ways to trick us, leaving us disappointed for being dim-witted enough to still believe that anything online might be genuine.
This is what happened on February 12th, when TikTok’s favourite “normal” person, Connor Hubbard (@hubs.life on the platform) quit his 9-to-5 job – the very thing that made him famous in the first place – to dedicate himself to content creation full time.
But what are the 9-to-5 influencers – the category Hubbard falls into – and why are people outraged at him for quitting his job?
Ever since the dawn of the internet, people have been fascinated with the possibility of watching snippets of a stranger’s life. This is why the vlog (short for video blog) has been on the scene for two decades and remains one of the most popular forms of digital entertainment.
Records of the first vlogs predate YouTube, but the genre became a cornerstone of the famous video sharing platform when it was launched in 2005.
As years went by, online platforms multiplied and everyone’s social presence grew increasingly. Recently, especially with the rise of TikTok, vlogs have slowly transformed into a newer sub-genre and have been diluted into the “day in my life” format. This kind of content involves heavily edited videos regarding someone’s daily life – or at least what the creator wants us to think their life looks like.
Connor Hubbard adapted this kind of format to his day job, including shots of himself staring at his computer, taking a lunch break, and going to the gym. This kind of content is, first and foremost, boring.
And yet it’s successful: people enjoy it and interact with it, to the point where almost everyone is familiar with Hubbard’s themes. Individuals recognize themselves in his daily life and they are relieved when they realise that there are other people who are living boring existences and working ordinary jobs.
Not only do they draw comfort from the reassuring statement that they are not alone in the tedious average, but they also get the message that living a normal life is worthy of recognition, especially on TikTok, where people require highly entertaining content. The more relatable these strangers appear, the more views they attract and the more famous they get – to the point where they gain enough money out of it to quit the very job they declared they wanted to uplift.
“No, […]. My goal is just really to try to create a safe place for men and women to know that what they’re doing is just fine,” Hubbard said in an interview with GQ in May 2024, when asked if he would ever consider doing content creation full time. Less than a year later, however, he changed his mind and posted a video in which he announced he would leave his job to pursue “a new kind of 9-to-5” which turned out to be becoming a full-time influencer.
At that point, the illusion shattered and people who had grown admiring his ennoblement of ordinary life turned on him, by showering the infamous video with spiteful comments.
Hubbard is not the first influencer who built his brand around the image of the “normal” person, nor the only one who uses relatability to attract views, but he is the one that unwillingly lifted the curtain and let us peek behind the scenes.
The use of relatability on social media is profitable in the way it works, it attracts engaged viewers and active followers, but is dangerous because it can only lead in the direction of parasocial relationships, of which all of us are or have been victims. Parasocial interaction is a term used to describe the psychological relationship an audience creates with performers in mass media, television and online platforms.
The viewers develop an attachment to public personalities and come to consider them friends, even though the two never had direct interactions with each other. It’s an illusory experience that makes us believe that we know personally and intimately strangers whom we actually only meet through the carefully curated image that they feed us.
Parasocial relationships are tricky, because even though we feel like we are interacting with a friend, we are not: we don’t really know the people who pop up on our for you page or on our tv screen.
Most of all, in the case of online personas, the followers will think that influencers owe them something. The viewers know that it’s thanks to them that the creator got successful, they thrive when that person becomes more influential and grows rapidly, but the creator must know that a line is drawn somewhere and they must be careful not to step beyond it. Connor Hubbard achieved what any influencer dreads: he made us feel bad about ourselves, and who wants that, really?
I do want to make a case for Hubbard, though.
In the same interview for GQ discussed earlier, Hubbard revealed that video editing has always been his passion and that he had tried to pursue it full time, years before, but ultimately he had to renounce his dream because it wasn’t very profitable. At the end of the video posted in February he added a sentence: “a person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it”.
Imagine your dream being laid out in front of you, a possibility you thought was lost forever making its way back in your life. Imagine being able to pursue your passion and change your life toward the direction you have always wanted. Wouldn’t you take that once in a lifetime chance? The fantasy of the American Dream has been exhausted and dried out, the “do what you love” propaganda is over and too many young adults approaching the job market already know the humdrum they’ll live for the rest of their life. Can we really blame Connor Hubbard for making it out of the system? And wouldn’t any of us do the same thing, had we the chance?
Mihaela here! I was born in Moldova and I grew up in a small town in the mountains of Brescia, northern Italy. I’m currently in my second year of CLEACC and I have a deep love for reading and writing and I strive to use my passions to genuinely connect with people. My interests also span from history and geopolitics to swimming and hiking.
