The influencer—the digital high priest of narcissism. A creature birthed not from wisdom or experience, but from algorithms, attention economies, and a society spiritually starved enough to mistake performance for authenticity. These are not wise elders or deep thinkers or artists—they are mannequins of desire, draped in grifting for product placements and hollow aspiration.
Why do they suck, you ask? Because influence, in its true and ancient form, was the result of initiation—of depth. The tribal elder, the mystic, the poet—they influenced because they had been somewhere the rest of us hadn’t. They had crossed into the mystery and returned with maps.
But the social media influencer? While posing well for the camera, they go mentally nowhere. They have nothing to bring back because they never left. They don’t deepen the culture; they flatten it into brands and selfies and have the attention-sucking ability yet level of the depth of a wacky wavy inflatable arm flailing tube man. These people should have zero influence on you because they are avatars of a system that wants you distracted, dissatisfied, and docile. Their influence is not designed to liberate, but to bind. To bind your self-worth to metrics, your desires to commodities, your time to scrolling. They sell you a fictional life of curated perfection, where every emotion is a tawdry marketing opportunity, and every moment is staged for visibility.
And worse still, they’re not even real. Their personas are as manufactured as the products they push. Behind the filters and the follower counts is often a deep emptiness, a constant anxiety to remain relevant, to feed the machine and pretend that they desperately don't need therapy. They are not living— they are surviving within a spectacle, and they try to tractor beam the gullible into that same illusion. To be influenced by such beings is to become less real yourself. It is to lose the unique texture of your own soul in the smooth, bland sheen of the collective feed. It is to mistake simulation for sensation.
So we say, look elsewhere. Look to nature, into books, into the eyes of those you love. Let your influencers be the ones who make you feel more alive, not more inadequate. Let them be gonzo journalists, beat poets, punk rock rebels, shamans, authors, real educators, musicians, scientists—anyone who cracks open your mind instead of packaging it. Because influence, real influence, should expand your consciousness, not shrink it. Influencing you to be a deeper individual who can then influence others as well.