Kate Glavan was in a rut.
Ms. Glavan, 26, had moved to New York from Minnesota to attend New York University, graduated during a pandemic in which the job market was bleak and decided to try her hand at content creation. She posted running videos, and mixed in wellness, style and politics. She even organized a weekly run club, building a steady following along the way.
After seven years in the city, and the death of her father, she felt she was not appreciating New York the way she once had. Caught between grief and restlessness, she took a leap of faith and moved to London, documenting the entire process.
What she found on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean was not the reset she’d hoped for. Without a traditional job, she could not get approved for an apartment. Setting up a bank account or even a working phone number became a bureaucratic maze. With most of her audience in the United States, few British brands wanted to collaborate. American companies struggled to ship her products after Brexit. She pivoted to focus squarely on political content, only to find her videos performing poorly. The financial strain mounted.
It was playing out publicly, in real time. Ms. Glavan realized she was in the midst of climbing cringe mountain, a concept that has become an inescapable step of adulthood for the members of Gen Z who grew up with their entire lives — even the embarrassing stuff — being documented online.
“I’m not saying being an influencer is necessarily the hardest job in the world, but you don’t have, like, a boss or a career or any sort of feedback about what you could be doing better,” Ms. Glavan said. “It can be fairly easy when you are climbing cringe mountain to take it all out on yourself. Maybe I’m ugly, maybe I’m stupid, maybe I’m annoying, maybe my videos suck.”
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