Is there life after influencing?

She had once had what he wanted: flexible hours, no boss, a devoted audience so rabid for her recommendations that she could command as much as $20,000 for a single branded Instagram post advertising alternative nut flours or frozen sweet potato fries on her 400,000-follower account, @LeeFromAmerica.

The co-worker pulled her aside that first morning, wanting to impress upon her the stakes of that decision. “This is terrible,” he told her. “Like, I’m at a desk.”

“You don’t get it,” Tilghman remembered saying. “You think you’re a slave, but you’re not.” He had it backward, she added. “When you’re an influencer, then you have chains on.”

In the late 2010s, for a certain subset of millennial women, Tilghman was wellness culture, a warm-blooded mood board of Outdoor Voices workout sets, coconut oil and headstands. She had earned north of $300,000 a year — and then dropped more than 150,000 followers, her entire management team and most of her savings to become an IRL person.

The corporate gig, as a social media director for a tech platform, was a revelation. “I could just show up to work and do work,” Tilghman said. After she was done, she could leave. She didn’t have to be a brand. There’s no comments section at an office job.

Tilghman, 33, recalled the encounter late last month during a 90-minute, $40 Zoom workshop she held to guide other creators through the process of leaving influencing. (True, fine, she’d advertised the event on Instagram.) The existence of the workshop — a small counterweight to the classes, seminars and boot camps that promise to teach civilians how to become influencers — indicates a new disillusionment on the part of even the most prominent content creators.

For more than a decade, social media has carried with it the implicit promise that with some combination of luck and incessant posting, a user with no connections, no experience and sometimes no discernible skill can become rich and famous. In 2019, a Morning Consult report found that 54% of Generation Z and millennial Americans were interested in becoming influencers. (Eighty-six percent said they would be willing to post sponsored content for money.)

Lee Tilghman in Brooklyn neighborhood on March 24, 2023. (Amy Lombard/The New York Times)

But the dream — as report after report and tearful vlog after vlog have made clear — comes with its own costs. If social media has made audiences anxious, it’s driving creators to the brink. In 2021, TikTok breakout star Charli D’Amelio said she had “lost the passion” for posting videos. A few months later, Erin Kern announced to her 600,000 Instagram followers that she would be deactivating her account @cottonstem; she had been losing her hair, and her doctors blamed work-induced stress. In 2022, Kara Smith, an Afro-Indigenous influencer who said she had been making $10,000 to $12,000 a month on TikTok, decided to take a full-time job, hoping to be less dependent on brand deals for income, she said.

Tapering Off From Influencing

In 2018, at the apex of her social media success, Tilghman endured modest cancellation when she announced a series of events in cities nationwide. Ticket prices hovered around $500 at some sites; she called the meet-ups “Matcha Mornings.” Followers fumed, accusing her of squeezing her fans. Others dismissed the workshops as out of touch, even appropriative. The criticism rocked her. Her obsessive-compulsive disorder flared up. She felt paranoid and was afraid to leave her apartment. “That was the beginning of thinking, ‘I can’t do this,’” she said. “I’ll find something else. I’ll wait tables.”

Still, her post count never slipped. So it was a shock to her fans and haters alike when, in a puff of ashwagandha, she disappeared from posting in 2019.

Tilghman retreated from Instagram for five months — the equivalent of eons, according to social media’s stopwatch. When she returned that summer, gone were the well-lit food photos and adaptogenic lattes. She announced that she had spent part of her hiatus in treatment for an eating disorder. Her hair was in a bowl cut. (She told The Cut she’d given her hairdresser Jim Carrey in “Dumb and Dumber” as a reference.)

She posted less, testing out new identities that she hoped wouldn’t touch off the same spiral that wellness had. There were dancing videos, dog photos, interior design. None of it stuck. (“You can change the niche, but you’re still going to be performing your life for content,” she explained over lunch.)

She moved from Los Angeles to New York in December 2020, where her apartment broker — who saw the shift in Tilghman’s fortunes up close on rental applications — told her she was nuts for quitting influencing. (The broker then admitted her bias: “I want to be an influencer!”)

Tilghman slowed her sponsored posts. She was earning less than one-third of her old income. When she was laid off from the tech job in October 2021, she resisted the urge to post through it.

At the workshop, she was firm with the attendees that this would not be a seminar about “de-influencing,” the new buzzword that describes influencers who tell their followers what’s not worth their cash. Nor was it about anti-wellness influencing or mental health influencing. It was intended to be a practical intensive, with a section on how to write a resume that best frames influencer experience, and another on how to network. “For people who are here who want to learn how to be an influencer, but with balance, I don’t have tips,” she said. “For me, I couldn’t.” She has forsworn merch. She will not partner with an incense brand.

Tilghman’s problem — as the interest in the workshop, which she decided to cap at 15, demonstrated — is that she has an undeniable knack for this. In 2022, she started a Substack to continue writing, thinking of it as a calling card while she applied to editorial jobs; it soon amassed 20,000 subscribers. It once had a different name, but now it’s called “Offline Time.” The paid tier costs $5 a month.

Anna Russett, a workshop attendee, marveled at how similar Tilghman’s experience had been to her own. Russett, 31, worked on social media for a big advertising firm in Chicago, while amassing tens of thousands of followers on her personal Instagram account. Curious, she decided to go all in on influencing just “to see what that would feel like,” Russett recalled. It turned out to feel quite lucrative.

The internet personality Lee From America wanted to see what life was like as plain old Lee Tilghman. She is not alone. But leaving behind lucrative brand partnerships and high follower counts is harder than it looks.(Amy Lombard/The New York Times)

“It was like, if I do this one post, rent’s covered for the month,” she said. It was exhilarating but unstable. She never felt able to relax, and then she felt worse for not appreciating what to others seemed like uncomplicated good luck. “It made me feel kind of lost,” Russett said. In 2020, she found a job on the product team at YouTube. She now gets health care through work and paid time off. She doesn’t wonder how she’ll keep her numbers up while she’s on vacation.

She still uses Instagram, as does Tilghman, but Russett’s last sponsored post is from 2021. (Tilghman’s is from the start of 2022, although she said she did accept a direct-to-consumer couch in exchange for a tag eight months later.) “I still sometimes fantasize about it, not having a boss,” Russett said, thinking about the pull of influencing. “But I know it’s not realistic; that’s not how it was, and that’s not how it would be.”

Tilghman hasn’t ruled out more events like the workshop; she has also met one-on-one with other influencers for an added fee, helping them chart their own escape routes.

But mostly, she wants a job again — a boring job. “Put that in the article,” Tilghman deadpanned. She knows good exposure when she sees it.

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