Will we always daydream of a life we can’t afford? : Thoughts on Vlog, Reality Show, IG, and so on

Is this the time we consume reality shows the most in history? and we might have become one of the stars ourselves YUCK!

(Before we jump in, let me confess that this is my first English article. My English is far from perfect. Please accept my apologies in advance.)

The history of a life we can’t afford

I know it’s not new to hear that “Vlog is the new reality show”. But let me repeat again, may I?

Looking back in history, before reality TV was invented, we have magazines. More specifically.. fashion & lifestyle magazines, which exhibit luxury and stylish lives of urban rich people. I assume most of their readers were middle class, including me, plus some lived in a small town far away from those pretty things.

Roland Barthes, a social theorist (He had so many career titles but to me this suits him the most), once wrote about Elle magazine that the food recipes the magazine provided were very fancy with crazy decoration, such as partridges studded with cherries (lol whaat). That’s because their readers are a low-income middle class who would just want fantasies from the magazine. While another magazine that targeted readers with more income provided realistic recipes like Nicoise salad.

Elle Magazine, 21st July, 1952 | Credits Shiny Cookbooks

Jump back to today, where we have YouTube, IG, TikTok. I’ll mainly talk about YouTube vlogs since I’m a big fan haha. Here I’ve gathered some lifestyle that vlog culture has romanticized or made it becomes a thing.

• Urban life — Living in a big city having a spacious apartment in your 20s! 20 years ago who would think Carrie Bradshaw unrealistic life that we joked about would become real? *I also watched an interesting video criticizing an apartment tour video trend. Here you can check out > The Apartment Tour trend and romanticizing the city (NYC, London, Paris)
• Being productive VS Being unproductive— Like all other trends.. it starts with one thing becomes trendy, then here comes the anti side, and the anti side becomes new trend itself. For a while we’ve seen YouTubers created a video of them being unproductive and not feeling guilty about it, or being “healthy productive” whatever that means...
• Living an interesting life somehow — Travel, surf, shop at farmer market, have a minimalist lifestyle…. the rest you can fill.

And when I said ‘Can’t afford’, it’s not just about money. It’s all kind of unrealism. A rough example is like me living in Bangkok, a city with bad infrastructure, at the same time I watch western vloggers chilly walk around their cozy neighborhood. For a while I thought I’m kind of living a life like them… That’s a fantasyy. Walking in Bangkok is not that cozy, it’s hot, unsafe sometimes, our sidewalk was poorly built… yeah

But there’s a product we can buy to get a taste of it, of course

Consumerism always finds a way to get us. I used to buy Chanel lipsticks after watching “Coco Before Chanel” movie. The movie made me like the brand’s aesthetic but I can’t afford their bag or tweed jacket lol (Even the lipstick is too pricy for a 20 years old student -.-)

We’ve seen vloggers/YouTubers/influencers promote pretty much everything. One would buy some irrelevant sponsored product just to feel like they’re being that girl/that boy.

Before the idea of this article popped up, I just watched a moving apartment vlog sponsored by a supplements e-commerce platform. Pretty irrelevant yeah?

*Roland Barthes’s article is from his book Mythologies.