My Alma Mater is Trolling Me

Wrestling with relevance and being mediocre (again).

Listen, I’m not here to yuck someone else’s yum. We are all trying to find our way in a world that, at this point, is functioning off madness. My Not Enoughness that sparks essays like these is for me to fully sort out in my journal and in therapy. And yet, I do think inquiry is fair. Because this is the world we are creating, and what is it going to turn into if we are not intentional about how we are shaping it?

Flaring Inadequacy

I got my college alumni magazine in the mail recently. I still love an analog delivery of connection. I haven’t been back to my alma mater since graduating in May of 2011, so it’s nice to get caught up with the happenings. Except, of course, when it presses on my ever-tender inner bruise of envy and shame.

At the same time I’m reading the hero headlines - Build Loyal Audiences and Booming Businesses, Stay Passionate and Show Up Every Day - I’m opening my kitchen junk drawer blindly reaching for a lighter to burn this booklet of paper and stare into the fire while I reconsider all of my life choices. But instead of the magazine going up in smoke, reading those first sentences becomes the oxygen the tiny yet constant flicker that lives in me needs. Before long, my old flame flares up and my Not Good Enough alarm is blaring through me.

I wasn’t always this easily inflamed. When I was an unpaid intern in college, then when my career was just beginning, I wasn’t trolled by what others were doing. I literally didn’t know unless I had an actual conversation with someone, or maybe I saw a fleeting 150 characters on the platform formerly known as Twitter. I was naive to the burgeoning world of social media. Future career possibilities weren’t even thought of.

Flash forward to now. Content Creator as Career is the thing. I am a marketing professional, I know this. I understand. Yet me, the 36-year-old Millennial mom who has been self-employed since 2015, doesn’t always want to vulnerability vomit alongside trending audio and filtered montages. Most of the time, I don’t even want to strategically create content for the endless pursuit of success and accolades in the noisy internet landscape.

But I’m also kind of already doing that, aren’t I?

I’ve been on this journey of how to be a person on the internet for a lot of years now. And I can’t lie and say that seeing my fellow classmates featured in the alumni magazine for all their successes didn’t make me want to have those same successes.

Call it the Leo Rising in me, or better yet name it as the Comparison we’ve all been trained to embody since broadcasting and absorbing our lives on the internet, but being successful and having a tangible body of work that’s recognized by some masses is something a part of me hopes for.

All that on-camera work I did in college, that Bachelor’s degree in Television Production I received, was the ideal proving ground for today’s world, where now it’s required to be a video director and producer of your own life (the alumni magazine really drilled that point home). Could the last 15 years have been a waste of potential?

But if achieving that success in today’s world is to succumb to content creation as in: a daily public display that conflicts with, or even disavows, what I value and how I want to show up in the world… I don’t want that.

Digital Trash

Even if your occupation is one in which it’s not at all required to create content to support or promote it, there’s still the participation in what is culturally mainstream. There’s the ingrained “Let’s make a video to go viral!” mentality. The TikTok dance. The sharing of curated moments. The side hustle. The performance.

We hope for the ding ding ding of dopamine to roll in. “Omg yes!” <3doubletap<3 “Love to see this!”

Then wait, ohhh, the things my online audience loves now have the potential to make money. In a capitalist society such as ours, this makes sense to pursue. And considering so much of the legwork of content creation is unpaid while you’re building and growing, to be recognized and paid is validating and rewarding.

Then, we need to be engaging with the engagement we get on the content we create. The wheels need to keep turning on the never-ending internet. More opportunity comes from said engagement. More opportunity means more monetary earning potential. More money is exciting! And before long, the expectation is to compromise values for the sake of engagement. Or our values system has completely eroded because all of a sudden the once creative expression of content creation is now a product-placement-laden set that’s supposed to resemble a real life.

Haley Nahman gets to this point:

I also don’t blame influencers for getting in on one of the quickest, easiest ways to make money in a broken country. Just as selling out has become a prerequisite to fame, moral compromise has become a prerequisite to existing under capitalism.

And while the moral compromise can be made more easily justifiable when it’s coupled with cash, it’s Authenticity that is always expected and promised when it comes to online content creation (the alumni magazine really drilled this point home too).

In 2026 though, we have more than a decade of experience and data on what it means to successfully perform on the internet. So is it actually still possible to remain authentic? Can one authentically share about a product that has been given to them for free and/or they’ve been paid to share about?

Ochuko Akpovbovbo of as seen on shared in an interview, and I’m paraphrasing here, that it’s actually no longer about authenticity in today’s digital culture. Not only has that word been repeated so many times that it sounds weird, we don’t really know what it means anymore. Content creation has morphed and those creators have become the advertisers themselves - in control of their own narrative, yes but still in exchange for goods and money - so what it really is about is effortlessness. Making things so seamless that success looks easy. So seamless that we can no longer discern that we are being sold to all. the. time. So seamless that constant consumerism, wealth, and individualism aren’t something we poke at and ask questions of. It’s just what we see and opt into because it’s what we do. It’s what’s relevant.

We’ve now arrived in this landscape where baity content (rage, shame, sex, trauma, feminism, and other colorful varieties) is the prerequisite to rise above the noise. Then relevancy equates success, especially monetary. Yet in order to stay relevant, the expectation is to consistently churn out kind-of-sort-of trash because it’s quantity and attention that are commodified. And this process of creating mildly entertaining, but definitely persuasive content becomes exhaustive.

I’m sure there are influencers and content creators all over the internet town that feel creatively and passionately fulfilled (the alumni magazine obviously supports this sentiment). And let me not forget they are just playing the game within the framework of culture and society. I feel both on my high horse and grounded in truth when I constantly come back to: How much of it is purposeful and how much of it is just swipeable trash?

And at what expense? Not just the energy it takes to be shrimp-bodied over the phone to make a video with all the elements to go viral. But the diminishing of our humanness from the compromises we bend to and the blind eyes we turn.

Trash can be entertaining but trash isn’t sustainable. And eventually, trash ruins the planet.

My Big Feelings

Even with the ability to tease apart this knotty topic and interrogate the fact that what’s presented as success isn’t always as shiny as it’s made out to be, here I find myself wrestling with relevancy. And mostly I’m feeling inadequate.

I thought that as I get older I’m supposed to be arriving at the feeling of caring less what others think. Except I do care what others think. On my worst days, I’m keenly aware of a descent into being invisible. I can slowly see myself fading into the Millennial Cringe of the past, out of focus and not “on trend” with how to keep up, stay visible, and stay relevant.

Not to be that girl on the internet, but I think I’m entering a messy middle.

This summer I was perusing the windows of my small town shopping center where American Eagle resides next to Talbots. I stood between both, knowing that AE was absolutely no longer for me, but I have also not reached the point of chic, classic ladies’ aesthetic either.

Sometimes it’s easy to just accept it (it being my career, my age, my current season, my perceived relevance) for what it is. Other times, I want to have myself a pity party and throw my phone into the ocean.

I’m not alone in my #feelings as people I admire and am friends with in real life have similar thoughts and ideas. My bestie Maddie Teren Adams illustrates so well the BS of Instagram and her retreat from tech. Claire Gibson shares her published author’s perspective when it comes to selling and being sold to. Jess Kirby’s newsletter A Common Thread discusses life post-influencing. And Isabel Cowles Murphy writes about the case for embarrassment in the world of perfectionist internet performance.

Many of us aren’t really here for it anymore. We feel our souls screaming from the inside that they don’t want to be distilled down and contained into a tiny pocket-sized computer that dulls and deprives the senses.

So I’m not featured in my alumni magazine. The friends I do keep in touch with from college literally do not read or receive it. I’m feeling sorry for myself based on a perceived standard that a marketing team put together with the goal of me giving them money.

Clearly, I’ve had my aforementioned pity party about my irrelevance on the faceless internet.

Now, I’d like to take the same amount of hours I’ve spent ruminating and apply them to being relevant in my tangible, everyday life. Things I’m thinking of:

• Being the friend someone can call, no matter how much time has passed.

• Being the mom who brings packaged snacks to share at the playground.

• Being the Y group fitness instructor who hoots and hollers and plays the music just a bit too loud.

• Being the person who holds the door and tells a stranger that their outfit is fabulous.

What’s relevant, and vital, is being present and living in real time. You know, the one wild and precious life of it all.

I have a thing for quote art.

I post new entries once or twice a month and you can catch up on my thoughts about vanity, boobs, regret, mothering, books, and finding meaning in it all until the next one arrives. <3