2023 has set in and already a couple of weeks have been knocked off on our new Calendars. As we all have planned to have a changed individual with the same person you were in 2022 doing certain things on each day of the Calendar. You want to have a perfect day in your life with a clear focus. But these are the days of social media, you cannot help but peek into others’ lives making you feel envious and craving things outside your own plans. It all starts around the same time in January.
What motivates someone to post their lives in form of videos on social media? I tried to study and find a rationale. As a part of my search, I was directed to many “day in my life” videos on TikTok. It’s a robust cottage industry of satirical “day in my life” videos. They are very different from the earliest days of the “vlog,” or video blog, in the early 2000s. YouTube may have made a few people very famous for taping their every waking minute and posting it online, but YouTube isn’t like TikTok: It takes a lot more time, effort, and skill (and money!) to pull off a good 15-minute video. A one-minute video on an endless scroll app that invents new famous people every day, meanwhile, can get seen by a lot more people.
Thanks to TikTok, there are “day in the life” videos about being in med school or a day in the life of an IT programmer or a third-grade teacher. Then there are vlogs of travelers and those in addition recovery and wealthy bankers in gray apartments with huge closets just for their shoes. There’s so little self-awareness in what people are choosing to post about themselves,” say experts. Strangely they all have the tone of faux humility and earnestness with which creators narrate their videos which experts find intriguing
For most, “day in my life” videos are opportunities for voyeurism, sure, but they are also satisfying on a more basic human level: By watching other people be productive, we get to feel productive ourselves. In the span of a few minutes or even less, we’ve seen a person get up, get dressed, clean their home, beautify themselves, prepare meals, send emails, take an exercise class, grab a glass of wine with a friend, and cuddle with their cat before lights out. How does this guy manage this simultaneous filming?
A researcher says: “Even the most realistic-seeming, mundane “day in my life” vlogs require a pretty big lift — in an attempt to test this theory, I decided that I would record a “day in my life” TikTok video on a random Tuesday, but immediately gave up after I got out of the shower. It was simply too much work without a real point: That day, like most Tuesdays, was going to be pretty ordinary and visually unstimulating”.
He further says that theorizes that “It seems like a very Gen Z thing to do, to post your everyday life as retaliation to Millennials, who grew up posting their trips to Turks and Caicos, but what you get is essentially like the same product. In a lot of these videos, what’s funny is that in a lot of the clips, you can see their friends will have their phones out, too, taking videos at the same time. Nothing is actually happening because they’re all posting.”
Perhaps that’s the reason why so many “day in the life” videos, no matter how aspirational or ostentatious, share a quiet melancholy. Here is a person who just wants to be seen when they are by themselves when nobody else is around. Maybe they’re looking for some kind of meaning, maybe their lives feel small, or maybe they feel so big that they can’t help but want to share it. It’s why the best “day in my life” videos are the ones that give voice to all the anxieties and self-consciousness that come with being a person who spends a lot of time thinking about how they present to the world.
No “day in my life” video is ever going to be a perfect representation of someone’s existence, but they’re more fun to watch when they’re made by people who spend the time to ask the fun kinds of questions: What are we all doing? Is this what life is? The more generic they are more they are appealing.
That goes back to the same question as to why people would like to post and as well see these videos
They want to curate their personal brand: For better or worse, we all care how we are being perceived by other people. They want to be heard: Humans are inherently tribal creatures, with an inherent desire to be accepted and ‘liked’ by our community. We want to feel our opinions are important and thus bloggers blog like what I have done. They want people to consume their content: There are plenty of social media users out there who spend a lot of time creating content, whether that’s a blog post like this, or vlog, or a TikTok video. They want to stay connected: Over time, social media has become the primary means for keeping in touch with loved ones. Millennials and Gen-Z are less likely than previous generations to phone their buddies. Many opt to keep in touch by ‘liking’, ‘commenting, or sliding in the DMs on social media instead. It’s all about self-esteem: When someone uploads a good photo of themselves or news of a great achievement online, they are usually doing that for the praise of others. They want the self-esteem boost of people liking their photo, or distant friends congratulating them on their achievements. Finally, As part of our tribal nature, we strive to ‘fit in’ with our community. As such, there are people who make social media posts, simply because everyone else is. We need to find a perfect life social media balance.
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