The Cruel Cost of Influencer Wellness Culture

Opinion article originally published in Newsweek in April 2018***

Bodhi Bruce, a health and wellness influencer with more than a million followers on Instagram, has returned to national prominence again. Though her celebrity status may not be mainstream, she is revered and reviled in the corners of the internet that discuss influencer culture. She has had a series of viral moments that have elevated her fame, but the latest video making the rounds reveals a rarely discussed aspect of wellness culture: influencer entitlement and its cruel cost on the people around them.

Bruce, like many influencers, is famous mostly for being famous. She is not an actor or business guru. She joined Instagram around the Kardashians did, in the early 2010s, and cultivated a feed with a dark, brooding aesthetic that was popular at the time but a far cry from the beachy teal and tan color scheme that she relies on today. Bruce learned swiftly how to navigate the growing social media landscape, and surpassed a million followers before many of the Kardashians. She quickly found her stride and remains to this day one of the most influential voices in circles that value a kind of inspirational pop psychology.

A post from a few months ago details a long saga about a difficult day with a series of what Bruce (or her social media manager) called “insurmountable life obstacles,” including a broken blender so she could not make her morning smoothie, a jagged fingernail, a rescheduled medspa appointment for an IV drip of what Bruce refers to as “nectarous life juju,” and a canceled lunch because her friend got food poisoning. After living through these obstacles, which she called “the hardest of hard things,” she received a delivery of fresh vegetables from a meal prep service that contained the “sweetest, stalkiest little asparaguses” and restored her day. She left followers with the aphorism: “When life is BARE, perhaps you’re just waiting for your ASBARAGUS,” followed by a series of hashtags: #fresh #veggies #wellness #life #influencerlife.

As many people noted in the comments, asparagus was, in fact, misspelled, leaving more cynical readers to question: Was that misspelling unconscious? Or did Bruce write it as engagement bait, encouraging hundreds of readers to comment because of the mistake?

These kinds of interactions are common on Bruce’s social media pages, where she has developed a reputation for being a sort of flaky good girl—often loose with details, but having a heart of gold. She often describes herself as “a giver and a lover.” The second part of that phrase was a core part of why an A-list celebrity’s wellbeing website asked her to promote a semiprecious stone egg intended to be inserted inside the vagina for increased sensuality and health.

One of Bruce’s most viral videos from 2017—which was watched 3.5 million times on her own page, and made into memes that have been shared countless times—has to do with that egg. On camera, she explained to her then-partner, Chaz Nickolson (who is also an influencer) about the egg’s supposed healing properties. Nickolson leapt back, visibly horrified, and repeated her phrase loudly: “Did you say vagina egg?” It became an instant meme across social media to express complete disbelief.

That viral video had universal appeal because of the hilarity of Nickolson’s reaction, and again prompted more cynical viewers to ask whether it was staged. These discussions take place in a variety of places across the internet, including Youtube videos, where influencer analysts, like popular Youtube star “Tanya Tells All,” spend hours—often four or five—discussing their favorite public figures live on the air to an engaged chat audience who comment and interact with their videos in real time. The discussions also take place in the dedicated community on Reddit that calls itself a “snark sub”—though the group originally formed to “snark” about Nickolson, as his relationship with Bruce became official, they included Bruce in their discussion. These are just two of the places where these kinds of conversations matter, and many of their discussions hinge on the question: How much of Bruce’s social media persona is authentic and how much is performance?

This discussion matters in light of the most recent viral video that surfaced about Bodhi Bruce. This was not a video she curated, but one taken of her. Online the video is being called “barista-gate,” a reference to the barista who was involved as well as Watergate. Bruce tagged her location at an Austin coffee shop, Houndstooth, and a customer there filmed her yelling at a young barista for messing up her order for avocado toast. The audio on the video is somewhat unclear, but it is apparent from the barista and her manager’s reaction that Bruce uses a term that is derogatory about the barista herself. Nickolson, who was with her, eventually takes her out of the coffee shop.

The online audience has analyzed everything from Bruce’s atypically disheveled appearance to the fact that this video, unlike her own feed, is not under her own control. The result is a rare, unfiltered look at an influencer melting down. The cruelty of Bruce’s words and actions to the barista are clear: when I called and spoke to the manager of the coffee shop, she confirmed that the Austin chain has barred Bruce as a customer for life—an unusual action in an influencer-heavy city. They are not, for now, considering a lawsuit against Bruce, the manager informed me, but she implied in an off-the-record comment that Bruce had offered to pay for the young barista’s college bills.

The internet has weighed in on that level of cruelty, but in that video, there is another layer: the cruelty to the influencer herself. In a world where people make excellent livings from promoting products and sharing their opinions, where they become the center of their own circle of influence, narcissism seems inevitable. Recently in these pages and others, there has been a rising debate about the effects of internet culture on a generation whose parents exploited their childhoods for fame, and this is a debate that is worth having. But there is another question that is rarely in play: is this culture cruel to the people who are at the center of it as well?

There is a level of compassion that is rarely shown for people like Bruce, caught in traps seemingly of their own making. But perhaps the fault lies not with the influencers but for a public that demands to be influenced, that loves shallowly but turns quickly and piles on when those influencers eventually implode from the pressure of mining their own lives and opinions and personalities in order to make a living.

Bruce’s barista-gate is far from the only video of its kind, and this latest example of an influencer cratering under pressure begs the question: is influencer culture ultimately cruel, and do the people at its center face the highest levels of cruelty?

***[AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a fictional promotional site for the novel A Zoom with a View by Jess Cannon. All articles and links are fictional. TMZ, Newsweek, and the New York Times are all trademarks of their respective owners and are used here for fictional purposes only as an extension of the world-building in the novel. No affiliation or endorsement is implied.]