After Daniel Hayon, a 23-year-old from Los Angeles, graduated from Claremont McKenna in 2023, he started looking for a job. Interviewing with a fashion start-up, a real estate company, a few tech firms, and marketing agencies, he made it to the final round of 10 different job applications. “I had five or six interviews with each company,” he told me. “I did projects for all of them. It was a 12-week process, and some of the recruiters would ghost me for weeks.”
In the end, none of the companies came through. The night before his final interview for one position, he said, he was told they were “postponing the role for at least six months because the economy is shit.”
“It was a really eye-opening process,” Hayon continued. “I just had to sit down with myself and be like: Is it really my dream to do business development at this random consumer tech company?”
The short answer, he concluded, was no.
Not having anything else constructive to do, Hayon began posting on TikTok. “I was done with corporate America and wanted to start experimenting a bit,” he said. “I had a couple of videos blow up. I got around 5,000 followers.” Maybe, he thought, he could become an influencer. He started to read “strategies on finding your niche” and posted videos, mostly funny ones, commenting on drag queen races. He studied successful influencers, hoping to discern their secret sauce. “I’ve had moments throughout my career where I thought that if I really was just persistent and just started posting, maybe that could be me.”
“Influencers being so open and honest about making four times as much as their old nine-to-fives, and having such flexible lifestyles, has opened my generation’s eyes into what’s possible,” said Daniel Hayon, 23. “It makes you feel completely disillusioned, and it’s made Gen Z nihilistic about working.”
Maybe that could be me. There are thousands—maybe millions—of Gen Zers who watch influencers on Instagram or TikTok and think to themselves: Maybe that could be me. The top influencers make serious money doing things we all do as part of daily life: renovating our apartments, taking a workout class, laughing at videos online, eating dinner with friends, walking in the park. From the viewer’s perspective, they are being paid to exist. The only difference is that they are documenting it.
“A lot of young people like me get frustrated seeing influencers making content that isn’t even interesting or funny and earning upward of six figures,” Hayon told me.
“Influencers being so open and honest about making four times as much as their old nine-to-fives, and having such flexible lifestyles, has opened my generation’s eyes into what’s possible,” Hayon said. “It makes you feel completely disillusioned, and it’s made Gen Z nihilistic about working.”
