Your Dream Life Isn’t Yours Anymore. Social Media Is Rewriting Your Ambitions.

When you were a kid and someone asked what your dream job was, you probably gave the simplest answers: “teacher”, “doctor”, or “vet”. As children, we had a very two-dimensional view of our dreams and aspirations.

So you can imagine my surprise when I recently asked my nephews what their dream jobs would be, and the five and seven-year-olds both responded with, “YouTuber!” It wasn’t the answer itself that surprised me. Being a YouTuber has proven to be a successful career path with a good income in this day and age. What shocked me was realising where these kids got the idea from. The media they consume.

And this doesn’t just apply to children.

When a guy on Hinge asks me if I go to Pilates instead of asking whether I go to the gym, I realise this idea that “all girls do Pilates” has been planted in his brain by the algorithm gods.

Our dream lives and ambitions aren’t ours anymore. Social media is rewriting them for us.

Pilates princess. Digital nomad. Entrepreneur. Side hustle. Trad wife. Luxury skincare. Influencer. Content creator. The algorithm has turned our aspirations into one giant High-Value-Dubai-Chocolate-Pistachio-Matcha-Labubu smoothie.

TikTok and Instagram Reels keep regurgitating the same vision of what our lives should look like. Influencers post morning routines: waking up at 5 a.m. to go for a run, sharing their Strava stats, hitting the gym, eating a high-protein breakfast, making the perfect coffee, and getting ready for the day, all before 8 a.m., before you and I have even opened our eyes. What does this do to our impressionable brains? It convinces us we're failing to live the dream life we're supposed to have.

Our ambitions are becoming trends. So much so that ordinary ambitions and career paths suddenly feel inadequate. If your dream is a normal nine-to-five, offline, in a non-aesthetically pleasing apartment, is that enough?

This is all tied to consumer culture. The economy thrives on our dissatisfaction. Social media promises that life will look and feel better if we all follow the same script. Buy the cute gym set. Pay for the Pilates membership. Get the Stanley Cup. Join the run club. Start posting content. Become an influencer. Then you'll finally be happy. That's what we all want… right?

These carefully curated ambitions have become an online performance. If you've ticked all the boxes we're supposedly striving for, you're somehow doing better than everyone else scrolling through your profile. Our ambitions aren't our own anymore. They're being shared and merged into one, to the point where no one seems to have individual ambitions anymore. Our dream lives are starting to look identical. Our mood boards are starting to look identical. Even the influencers are starting to look identical.

Consumerism is robbing us of our individuality.

There was a time when I thought becoming a content creator would be my dream job. But eventually I realised that much of what we see online is make-believe. The dream bodies some influencers show off aren't achieved through consistent workout classes. They're edited, filtered, or surgically enhanced.

The digital nomads supposedly living their best lives in Bali are sometimes funded by their parents.

Even those hyper-productive morning routines often aren't filmed in the morning at all. It's all content designed to sell the audience an idea, a product, a lifestyle.

What snapped me out of my influencer-dream hypnosis was getting offline and asking myself what actually fulfils me. We often mistake exposure for desire. We think we want a certain lifestyle when, in reality, we've simply been exposed to it hundreds of times through the hundreds of Reels we scroll past every day. Reducing your screen time gives you something algorithms never can: perspective. You begin seeing how ordinary people actually live. And most people are perfectly happy living ordinary lives, doing ordinary jobs. And that's okay.

I realised that travelling within my means, writing articles I'm passionate about, and having one reliable source of income is enough for me. Everything doesn't need to be documented for Instagram or TikTok.

On a final note, social media isn't inherently evil. It can be a wonderful source of inspiration, and we all have the ability to shape our own feeds, one follow at a time. Just make sure you aren't consuming content at the expense of your own life. Because your real life is enough.

Just ask yourself this: If Instagram and TikTok disappeared tomorrow, would you still want that career? Would you still move to that city? Would you still make that purchase? Would you still have those dreams? If your answer changes, then…

Maybe that dream was never yours to begin with.

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Photo © Bruna Marquezine