These people weren’t pretending that this is their life and that you should feel terrible because your life isn’t cool. It was clearly a job, and the job was to share these great experiences with everyone else.

The problem was when these bloggers morphed into “influencers”. Influencers aren’t people whose job it is to show you cool stuff. Influencers are people whose job it is to live cool lives that you want to emulate. And the reason you want to emulate it is because they are always doing cool stuff.

The difference is subtle but highly consequential, IMO. The reason for the shift to influencers is that the food/travel blogger might be paid for an ad by the tourism agency of a place they visited, or a restaurant. Because you don’t want to be them. You want to gain information about traveling and eating from them.

But influencers make you want to be them, so now they can sell anything. The car they drive, the movies they watch, the toilet paper they use.

And the effect is that the former didnt make you feel bad about yourself, since the content made you think “ah, that’s a cool place I can go for my next vacation, or next birthday dinner is at that restaurant”, whereas an influencer makes you feel miserable cause you’re like “my life will never be as cool as theirs”.