Husband Wants To Quit His Blue-Collar Job To Become An Influencer — 'There's No Reward For Hard-Working People Anymore'
He doesn't even like being on social media. But he's tired of working so hard for so little.
DC Studio / Shutterstock.com Most of us at one time or another have felt the impulse to walk away from our jobs and never look back, especially as the economy and work life seem to become ever more punishing by the day.
One woman's husband has reached this kind of breaking point and is considering taking drastic steps because he's simply had enough.
The. blue-collar worker wants to quit his job to become an influencer because 'there's no reward for hard-working people anymore.'
He certainly isn't alone in that sentiment or in his proposed solution for that matter. People trading their 9-5 jobs for careers as content creators has been a trend for years now, and it's not just the 57% of Gen Z'ers a recent study says are considering the move.
But TikToker Melissa Jane's husband is a very different case than you might expect. He "has zero social media," she said in a recent video, and "actually thinks it's the devil." But even as much as he loathes the online world, she said he "has come to me and is like, okay, let's make some TikToks."
Jane saw in her blue-collar, social media-averse husband's attitude something of a barometer for just how dysfunctional our work lives and economy have become.
"I just think it's kind of scary," she said. "If my husband is getting to the point where he's like, 'I can't do this anymore, maybe we should do social media,' [expletive] has frozen over."
Her husband owns his own construction business, but she said the taxes, fees and other costs involved ensure he could 'never get ahead.'
Jane was careful to point out that it was not just that her husband was fed up with having to go to work every day and it was not because he suffered from the supposed laziness of which Boomers so frequently accuse younger generations. Rather, from the sounds of it, her husband has worked far harder than a lot of us.
"He has literally torn his body apart, had surgeries, like, every year, because he is physically harming himself with these jobs," she said.
But the exorbitant costs he faced for running his business, from taxes that inevitably go up the more money he made, to having to pay for things like worker's compensation insurance, has left him feeling nihilistic. "He cannot get ahead. He's like, 'What's the point?'"
In follow-up videos, she described a scenario familiar to many small business owners — the more money he makes, the more gets taken in the form of various taxes. But if he reduced his income, they would have trouble obtaining things like mortgages and car loans.
Some accused her and her husband of being bad citizens who didn't want to pay their way, but Jane said that was out of touch with both how government systems operate and with the way her husband runs his business.
For starters, her husband doesn't pay for benefits like health insurance for himself, for example, so that he can provide them for his employees instead.
Jane argued that the "astronomical" costs of running his business were ultimately the result of a systemic ploy to "keep small business owners down and then eventually out of business because the government and all these major corporations want to keep everything for themselves."
Taken all together, the experience led her husband to a point that many Millennial, and now Gen Z, professionals have arrived at. "Millennials don't want to work anymore," she said, "because there's no point. You cannot get ahead."
But in a stunning sign of the times, becoming an influencer may not be the solution her husband thinks.
So many people have left their jobs to become content creators that the industry has begun to be called a "bubble" waiting to burst.
Much like in most other fields, influencers making huge incomes have always been the exception to the rule. But recently, creators all over the internet have been lamenting the ways platforms like TikTok have abruptly changed how content is monetized and how influencers get paid. These changes have left many content creators struggling to get by.
It seems content creation, like everything else, is gradually becoming little more than a scheme for social media corporations to manipulate profits out of the very people whose work made those platforms profitable in the first place. There's no more American story than that.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.