I once traveled across the world to work at a smoothie stand. Crazy right? But yeah... It's true. I consumed a lot of content at the time of nature loving, hippie creative influencers. They would write poetry, eat mangos and sing "One Love", and figured, why not just move to Hawaii?

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I packed a ukulele and a beach towel and decided to follow all the kind of quotes you'd imagine an influencer preaches. And while that sounds pretty vain I'm quite aware, it was a HUGE growing lesson for me. Because unlike most people who never get a chance to meet their beloved idols, I got to meet mine, and got to fall in love with re-appreciating the regular things in life.

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I had stayed in Honolulu, a city in Oahu, for about 3 months and had begun to plan how I would move to North Shore. I had traveled up North to the legendary surf meca and I was hooked. The palm trees were always taller than the buildings, the birds were singing no matter where you go and butterflies would wave their wings at you wishing you a blissful day. And damn. The surf was good. 

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Upon staying at an Airbnb, a surf competition judge told me "people who come to North Shore that aren't from here make a mistake". I shook it off and went to go get a job. The job was at a little shack, a worldwide known one, called The Sunrise Shack. 

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The first time I saw the Shack I was wide eyed. I'd seen it in so many videos and Instagram posts. Koa Rothman, a legend from a family of well known surfers, along with Alex, Travis and Koa Smith would be there. For me to fathem that the man I had seen break a Guinness World Record surfing a once in a lifetime wave in Skeleton Bay, was in front of me and going to be my boss was unbelievable. It was like what I imagine meeting Tom Cruise is like for Scientologists. Scratch that. It's what I'd imagine Tom Cruise meeting aliens would be like. Anyway... It was out of this world. 

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After speaking to Travis on the phone, an interview with him was set and I was hired. I started working in the back making the food, smoothies and slowly working my way up to the cashier. There was always so much competition between the girls which always had to do with being visible in front of some celebrity male that came by. The men rule the dating scene at the North Shore, not women. Long term serious relationships often don't come by, and the dating dynamic is very different. Especially if one has over a million followers, brand deals and tourists lining up at his door. 

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I want to be honest here and say I honestly met some really incredible people at North Shore. I had met very cool creatives on vacation, and met humble legends like Kelly Slater and a musician named Louis who taught me the Lion King song on ukulele. But talking about how cool they are is not that great a story or lesson, and would probably creep my boyfriend out. So let's get back to business. 

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It came as somewhat of a shock to me at age 23 to realize all the glitz and glamour was completely fake. The people preaching One Love while sitting on a beach talking about being against consumerism culture and uniting with nature, often could afford to also live at that beach and talk like that. They often didn't know how to empathise with people and only really cared about their goals and their statues. Especially at work, the minute a challenge came by, these people never knew what to do. Once after a day of being logistically unready for that amount of orders we got, I saw a girl give a head massage to a male employee, who laid on the floor after deciding to "sit this one out". 

 

One of my "Black Mirror" days on North Shore was when Instagram changed their algorithm and they had closed many bot accounts. The Shack felt like memorial day. Girls with big followings from the Shack were depressed and any surfing influencer that stopped by was sad about it too. At this point I started noticing how different this environment was. Suddenly I couldn't un-hear how all the influencers always sounded like they were speaking in Instagram comments or in "inspirational photo captions". I had realized how self absorbed and ungrateful they are, and how obsessed they had become with growing bigger on the platform without really taking the time to understand how lucky they actually are or to think how to utilise this platform for good. It felt like the employers sometimes didn't really realize how much their workers are doing for them, and felt very hands off unless they needed to film content like handing over a coffee cup at the register in a cute photo. Another "Black Mirror" day was when I started noticing how many people would ask me to follow them on Instagram and then unfollow me once they do. Suddenly the vision of people being very "put together" disappeared and a new sober understanding begun.

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Many of these really big influencers were born into very financially stable homes, that accommodated them spending hours online or surfing. By all of Malcom Gladwell's observations of success they were "at the right place at the right time" to get a following, and not really brilliantly strategic about it. Filming nature in Hawaii and people in bikinis at the height of Instagram's growth is exactly what the platform wanted. But along with that, the people around them started seeing their virality and wanting things from them. Many of those who grew fast young ended up doing a lot of drugs and becoming addicted to alcohol and sex. I often wondered if the lack of education to preoccupy the mind, and love of physical sports sort of inflicted on the men a life long chase of being unsatisfied with one partner and rarely happy. Competitiveness grew between those who will only go surf if there are photographers to film them and those who claim they really do it "for fun". It seemed as if influencers sight was sharpened towards aesthetics, which often resulted and noticeably treating people better based on how well they look. The only books they would ever read are self help books, never anything that would translate to them helping others or having better skills to do work. Additionally, how they present themselves would become concerningly inseparable from their own identity. 

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One day a really big influencer who inspired me a lot in my early twenties showed up. I'll be really lame and honest here and admit, I cried. So lame. But yes, she really moved me with some poetry and videos she made and I felt like she really understood me. I walked up to her and after a second of talking we hugged and suddenly I realized, I was being filmed. Claire (her real name) came along with another girl named Kelly and Kelly thought this was a great opportunity to get content of an emotional "fan meeting her idol" style video. It was so violating and I asked them not to post it. This was the day I had also realized no female influencer (who isn't a well known model in her career) looks the way she does online in real life, and they often have noticeable eating disorders. Claire, who admits she has had an eating disorder (but claims she got over it) now sells teens a $60 course about things like "intuitive eating". I would later learn she also ran two financial schemes online that would take money from her adoring fans and that she never really paid or lived in the lavish lifestyle she claimed to have. It sort of became uneasy for me to be around these influencers because I always felt they would just pop out a phone and start filming. But this was mainly because their grandiose worth and behaviour would make me doubt my own. And often it felt that they saw some floating button of followers over a person and if you didn't have it you were somehow a lesser person. No matter how hard I worked at the Shack, or how many times I would listen to people talk about them being sad because their friends are getting better gifts and brand deals than them, I never felt like anyone there appreciated me or knew even how to appreciate someone other than themselves.

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Another odd influencer moment would happen around some of the house parties on the North Shore. On Christmas my friend and I were invited to Jay Alvarrez's house. If you don't know him, he's the kind of guy that posts about spirituality while not really having a job and takes pictures next to VERY BLUE water. When we got there, Kelly, the influencer who filmed me cry meeting Claire, stood at the door alone and told us we're not allowed to enter the house. In a National Geographic narration of this scene, Kelly would be the female baboon with only 20k followers, thirsty to feist on the statues of Jay's 6 million of followers. Did I say followers? Whoops I meant his groupie cocaine.

 

This also happened when my roomate and me were invited to Koa Rothman's house (one of my bosses), when a girl came up to us and told us as we approached the lawn that we should leave. Quickly we outsiders and non influencer people, would come to realize the weird hierarchy of the sexes and the follower count at this place, and would continue to move on and pursue our own thing. 

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Another thing to note about many of these nomadic and surfing influencers is that they are often not highschool educated. Not even at a middle school level sometimes. The full truth about pro surfers is they're often groomed by their parents at a young age, like ballerinas or swimmers. So if Hawaii already didn't have a strong emphasis on education, you can imagine what "homeschooling" will teach.

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Not all influencers are like this however. I met a very cool surfer named Dominique who was incredibly inspiring and hard working. She saw the opportunity her athletic abilities and Instagram following could have, and was able to fund a better life for herself. Another big wave surfer I got to know is named Emily and she has a passion for surfing I had never really known another woman to have, and she surfs 50 FOOT waves. She never really cared about her following and just kept pushing her big wave surfing abilities, and for that I really admired her. 

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One of the successful female influencers I met would one day tell me: "You know, I keep thinking everyone hates me. People DM me and say that I don't smile at people and I just look happy on Instagram and therefor I must be fake. Sometimes they say I go surf and don't smile while doing it so they think I don't really like surfing." 

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"That's so weird, no one smiles when they surf. So what do you do about it?"

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"I now make myself smile more when I surf or when I'm walking down a crowded street. I take pictures with more people and try to be as nice as I can." 

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My gut feeling was she was starting to be riddled with some very real social anxiety at a very young age. She must experience a kind of social pressure and expectation you or me will probably never experience. She told me how hard it is for her to get hateful messages from trolls or D pics. She doesn't even post a photo of her boyfriend because judging by her primary trolls, she thinks she will get a lot of pushback for not dating within her own race. She says this because she is a minority and says most of her hateful DMs are actually from within her minority blaming her for "misrepresenting" or "disrespecting" them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I feel like it's worthwhile to mention that I don't think influencers under 1 million make much real money from Instagram from what I've seen. Often only with certain brand deals does that really happen, and that's still considering that these people make Instagram a real and stressful job by spending hours on it. They often live without a future financial plan and don't have financial security while their friends have more stable jobs.

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Every year more young kids will see the vlogs from the Sunrise Shack and want to become pro surfers. But I wonder now that people are born into a user name and feel the pressure to build a good reputation, do the kids who dream of becoming a pro surfers really to be good surfers or do they just want followers and pretty girls around them?

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Some of my bosses would come in at 11 AM, arm over their last nights conquest to get them a coffee before parting ways. On one occasion one of them would spend a couple of minutes very high in my house trying to spend the night with my roommate before I had to awkwardly see him at work the next day and think "why did I ever think he was so cool?".

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It's such a wild thing. But granted, my bosses unlike many of the other influencers were nice and polite people. Like anyone, they have their shortcomings, but I guess few are the people that stay grounded going viral worldwide at age 20. To be brutally honest though, I do feel bad for them. Seeing the amount of times people come to the Shack and telling them they expect amazing things from them is a burden of an expectation to carry. People expect a lot from them, whether consciously or not. And granted, they are still very talented at surfing and boogie boarding, and I think Koa and Travis Smith are really nice, but it's a very weird environment to exist in if you're not some kind of digital superhero. 

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Internet fame often carries with it a lot of psychological shifts we so far don't really understand. Additionally, the part of our brains responsible for making good decisions doesn't finish developing until 25, so I really can't blame anyone I was disappointed from at North Shore. They live in a parallel universe I truly don't understand.

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Sometimes "making it" doesn't mean internet fame and living on the beach. Sometimes "making it" means realizing all that stuff means nothing, it's time to delete your Instagram and moving on to the next thing.

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The day I left North Shore was the day I moved in with what would becoming my darling boyfriend. And ladies and gents, that kind of love - is priceless. I never wish I would have stayed in North Shore, I just wish I would have read what was written in this post. Thanks for reading.

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