In 1914 Joseph Pilates was sitting in a World War I-era internment camp watching his fellow inmates waste away when he had an idea. As he later recounted to a journalist, the skinny prison courtyard cats kept spry and limber, stretching and moving even as they starved — could the German citizens interned in the camp at the Isle of Man do something similar? Pilates developed what would later become his namesake: a regimen of repetitive, controlled body movements with minimal equipment focused on flexibility and strength. Before it became synonymous with luxury workout leggings and YouTube videos, Pilates the exercise was a lifeline, born literally in a cage.

The practice has come a long way since, especially in the last few years. An industry report found Pilates is the fastest-growing mode of exercise, and subscription service ClassPass named it the most popular class type of 2024. Along with the boom, there is a new wave of cultural cachet — and sometimes ridicule — that comes with practicing Pilates, the same way yoga strayed from its roots to become part of the crunchy wellness culture of the 2010s. On TikTok, there is a formula for much of the most popular #pilates content: Influencers take turns posting from packed classes in mirrored, minimalist studios; smooth, algorithm-bait pop songs soundtrack clips of slender women, sweat dripping from every inch of their bodies. Pilates has ascended beyond being simply an exercise modality: It is a key part of a certain idealized life of leisure, affluence, beauty, and, importantly, virality. There is often matcha involved.

Antoinette Hocbo had gone to a Pilates class years ago, in her early 20s, and swore off it immediately. “I hated it. It was awful. And I was like, ‘I’m never doing Pilates again,’” Hocbo says. Then, this summer, the TikTok content started.

Hocbo had been looking to incorporate more exercise in her life: She had used ChatGPT to come up with workout plans and had searched on TikTok for fitness content. Soon enough, her algorithmic recommendation-fueled For You page was filled with related videos. Hocbo recalls the exact moment she was influenced: A content creator popped up, extolling the virtues of a specific Pilates instructor (she followed neither person). The endorsements in the video were glowing — this instructor’s videos will change your life. Beach weather was coming, and much of the content fed off the timeliness of getting a “summer body.” Hocbo decided to give Pilates another try and purchased the instructor’s online class ($199), along with a Pilates ball and blocks.

It wasn’t the only hobby she picked up because of TikTok. During one stretch, her For You page was a stream of artists using the drawing app Procreate. Though Hocbo had studied illustration, she had never tried it that way, and she was drawn to the idea of rebuilding with her creative practice. “I was getting lots of videos of people doing animation on their iPads, and I was like, ‘Do I need to buy an iPad?’” She picked up a used one on Facebook Marketplace.

Though she previously didn’t care much for makeup, her algorithm delivered influencers’ GRWM (Get Ready With Me) videos, where they meticulously narrate their makeup routines, complete with every product they use; pretty soon Hocbo found herself buying the same arsenal of minimal no-makeup-makeup concealers and foundations. One time-consuming product that she was successfully influenced into buying is a lip stain that she must paint on, wait 10 minutes for the color to tint her lips, and then peel off. She saw it on TikTok Shop.

“I get mad every time I use it,” Hocbo says. “These TikTok people convinced me this is the way, but now I have this stupid part of my makeup routine because of them.”

Hocbo knows all the tricks marketers and brands use to build consumerist desire — she used to work in marketing, chipping away at shoppers’ willpower until they caved and hit “check out.” Introducing new artistic practices in Hocbo’s life brought joy, but she also had a nagging feeling about how she got there in the first place.

“I always have this tension that I’m experiencing,” she says. “Is this a choice that I’m making for myself, or am I being influenced by this app or these influencers?”

Commerce has long been central to social media; as long as ads keep the lights on at Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, we will all be pressured to buy, buy, buy. Instagram was a mall even before #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt and Pinterest became an “AI-enabled shopping assistant.” The influencer industry — which Goldman Sachs has predicted will grow to nearly half a trillion dollars by 2027 — has snowballed into a possible side hustle for anyone with access to a phone. There’s a handful of MrBeasts and Alix Earles at the top and an untold number of micro-influencers hawking goods and services at the bottom. For audiences, it means we have spent the better part of a decade living within a 24/7 digital infomercial, with social media — sponsored content and organic posts alike — resembling not much more than a buying guide, a catalog of unabashed and conspicuous consumption. Some audience members find themselves in deep debt or describe their behavior as a full-blown shopping addiction; others have developed careful strategies in an effort to limit their consumption. We have never been so aware of all the things there are to purchase, and the frictionlessness of shopping apps disguised as social media has created an army of voracious buyers. What has this abundance done to us?

I report on the individuals, platforms, and brands that have successfully created a whole new industry we call “influencing.” But in order for all of that to stay afloat, influencers need people on the other side of the equation — they need the influenced. To understand how we got here, I talked with influencers and the people they successfully convinced about what it’s like online when the pressure to buy is suffocating.

Hacbo was able to stick with the Pilates program for a while through the summer, and says the regimen helped alleviate some lower back pain she had. But now Pilates has fallen by the wayside of her TikTok-driven hobby highway. The gear she bought haunts her home, unused.

“It’s just sitting there, mocking me,” she says.

Eventually, the Pilates content on her TikTok feed that was once relentless stopped, too — as if the algorithm knew it had done its job.

The impulse to shop is not exactly a secret — there’s often a resigned self-awareness to it. In a video viewed 1.5 million times, a woman stitches together clips of herself from random moments in her daily life. With a deadpan voice, and Radiohead’s “No Surprises” twinkling in the background, she recites highly specific products like she’s filling out a Mad Libs page: Chan Luu crystal toe ring. Arc’teryx hiking shoes. Vintage hoodie. “This is just the last 48 hours, mind you,” the caption reads.

This kind of video has become a mini-trend, with the idea being that the mere utterance of a temptation might soothe the part of your brain that wants to buy the item.

Christina Mychaskiw has always loved shopping, especially for clothing. Fresh out of pharmacy school in 2014 with $120,000 of student debt, she was making more money than she ever had in her life, yet didn’t have the skills to manage it, she admits. She stressed about her finances, then shopped to relieve the stress. Dropping hundreds of dollars every weekend became a new normal, and inspiration was everywhere: in stores, on Pinterest, on influencers’ affiliate link pages.

Mychaskiw’s rock bottom was when she pulled the trigger on a pair of studded Chloé ankle boots that cost more than her monthly rent after she saw them in a TV show. She knew she could return them — she was broke, with a negative net worth — but kept them anyway.

By the winter of 2019, Mychaskiw realized she was “financially fucking [herself] over.” She started a so-called no-buy challenge, swearing off shopping for around seven months.

Since then, Mychaskiw has found a happy medium for her shopping, where she doesn’t completely deprive herself but also proceeds cautiously. She makes wishlists of items she sees that she will come back to later, and has worked to develop hobbies not tied to accumulating things. But the pull is still there at times, especially after a period of scrolling. She can usually sense when she’s hit the danger zone.

“If I see something that I’ve scrolled through and I want to buy it then and there, it’s probably not a genuine want,” she says. “It’s just that buildup, that dopamine, that threshold that you have to hit until you need to put that energy somewhere.”

We see so much marketing material that in certain subcultures online it is not just common but the expectation. In traditional marketing, it was understood that brands had to expose consumers to their message three times before they actually engaged with it, like going physically to a store to buy a product. In the age of social media and algorithmic overload, that number is now seven, says Mara Einstein, a marketing-professional-turned-critic and author of the book *Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. *For one, the vastness of the internet has allowed for the number of available products to bloat beyond imagination — there are simply too many things. But how we learn about products has changed drastically as well; as media has fragmented to a million sites, feeds, screens, and algorithms, so too has the advertising we see. There is no one TV commercial a quarter of households are seeing, then telling their friends about. Instead we see a digital display ad here, an influencer’s video there.

Her debt swelled to over $50,000 before she vowed to dig herself out of the hole.

“You may be finding out information from people and so on, but you’re increasingly spending time in a space where you’re constantly being bombarded by sales messages,” Einstein says. Influencers know how to stay on message, constantly priming viewers to give in and buy something.

Being influenced is nothing new, of course. But the short- and mid-form video format creates a new type of intimacy and allure, especially if you are already looking for something to buy. It’s hard to argue with a sales pitch when you are watching someone in their home actually using the product they are trying to sell you.

The content doesn’t even have to be explicitly promotional: I recall a video I made last year about my reporting being used without credit by content creators. My frustration had hit a breaking point, so I recorded a selfie-style TikTok complaining about the contemporary media ecosystem. Only my head and a portion of my shoulders were in the video, but someone wanted to know where my blouse was from.

TikTok itself has only bolstered the idea that every piece of content is an opportunity to consume. Through TikTok Shop, anyone can become a digital salesperson. In much crueler, more tasteless examples, TikTok has added shopping prompts to videos coming out of Gaza: A woman in a head covering becomes a promotion for similar-looking garments with headscarves. A bespectacled Israeli activist protesting their government’s besiegement is a billboard for a pair of glasses.

For Elysia Berman, the covid-19 pandemic changed everything. Before lockdown, there was no shortage of inspiration from real people out in New York City or at stylish fashion industry events.

“Then the lockdown happened. I was stuck inside, I wasn’t really getting inspiration from anyone in my life,” Berman says. “I would just sit and look at my phone and buy what it told me to.” She purchased a green top she saw influencers wearing even though she almost exclusively wears black, New Balance shoes even though she doesn’t wear sneakers. Berman scooped up a Nap Dress from the brand Hill House Home — a flowy, nightgown-like dress that went viral during covid. “I looked like a Victorian child for half the pandemic,” she says.

Many of her purchases proved to have a short shelf life: “It was the most boring shit that I never wore, that I got rid of within six months,” she recounts. Shopping became an outlet for other frustrations in Berman’s life, an escape from a kind of fugue state she found herself in: She wasn’t yet sure who she really was, or what her hobbies were. She felt underpaid and undervalued. Friendships felt tenuous.

“With every purchase that I was making, I was trying to take one more step closer to being the person that I wanted to become,” she says. “You see people that you find aspirational — you want to feel one step closer to them. You want to kind of gain proximity to their lifestyle, and a lot of times what people do is they make purchases based on what that person recommends.”

By 2023, her shopping habits were impossible to ignore: She had four credit cards and four buy-now-pay-later services that each carried balances of between $4,000 and $8,000. She also had several loans. Her debt swelled to over $50,000 before she vowed to dig herself out of the hole.

Naturally, Berman has made videos warning people about the dangers of accumulating credit card debt; she shows viewers the “ridiculous” things she bought in her shopaholic phase — designer sunglasses! $200 headbands! 22 clear lip products! — as a cautionary tale. But even that can serve as an invitation to shop.

“I’ve had people tell me that they’ve purchased things just because I’m wearing them and I’m actively telling people to buy less,” she says. “I’m actively telling people the perils of shopping too much.” Berman recounts a video she saw of a user crying that their mother had died; some comments asked where their mascara was from because it wasn’t running down their face.

In addition to her day job as a pharmacist, Mychaskiw makes content about mindful spending habits without villainizing all shopping — there can be pleasure and even joy in consumption. She sometimes takes sponsored brand deals, but says she only promotes products she would actually buy herself and that she has personally vetted.

“I try to balance giving people the tools to decide when it’s okay to say yes to themselves, because that’s something that I had to learn, too,” she says.

It’s easy to blame the influencers for all of this — and many do, regularly, like clockwork. The most recent discourse cycle, in late September, was kicked off by a TikTok video with 390,000 views and arguments that stretched on for weeks.

“These influencers make way too much fucking money,” the video begins. “You’re just getting paid to sell people shit they don’t fucking need. It’s literally just overconsumption … You’re perpetuating this cycle that’s really keeping us trapped.”

Content creators are admittedly a perfect target for the general rage many of us carry around. Many of them seem unencumbered by the endless horrors of the world, with daily routines that include blocks of time for “warm water” and to-do lists with “plan out mocktails for the new year.” Their digital presence exists suspended in time, where there is always something new to recommend, packages of shiny new things waiting for them, and a willing audience that completes the positive feedback loop. Wouldn’t it be nice — as people are in line at food banks, fighting for a precious few job listings, and snatched off streets by masked agents — to sit in your home and talk to yourself for a living?

But the draw of the influencer is powerful; even if you cannot become her, you can own the same things she does. For Antoinette Hocbo, who picked up hobbies via TikTok, the characters she encounters on her For You page seem effortlessly cool. They have an eye for design, they’re interested in the arts, they drink wine. You buy into the person first, and eventually — hopefully — you buy the stuff, too.

“[There’s] the whole idea of parasocial relationships,” Einstein, the marketing expert, says. “If somebody has gotten to the point where they’re spending that much time online with someone, they’re vested in what that person has to say.” The feeling of intimacy is physical: When followers watch their favorite TikToker, they are literally holding them in the palm of their hand.

TikTok’s rise during the pandemic created a new playing field — ordinary people with no prior public presence could be catapulted overnight into the next viral character. Often, people stumble into a following accidentally: They’re funny or beautiful or well dressed or simply got lucky one day.

“With TikTok, a lot of creators describe it as almost like a gambling addiction where they would post something out there and they would see this viral boon,” Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor at Cornell University who studies the influencer industry, says. The pandemic upended work and labor, opening the floodgates for a new kind of job that previously was reserved only for the rich, well-connected, or very lucky.

“You have this platform that is enabling people to go viral fleetingly, and you have profound changes in the nature of work,” Duffy says. “All of a sudden you see this huge uptick in TikTok creators.”

If people hate influencers as much as they say, they have a funny way of showing it.

TikTok made going viral a possibility for a whole new slate of people. Now the hard part is how to keep things rolling when it happens to you. Most of the platforms themselves do not pay much for views, but brands eager to partner with buzzy people do. Creators often talk about their work in terms of self-discovery or self-actualization: This is who I want to be online, and these are the products and tips I truly, honestly want to share.

The tension comes then with the “very real commercial realities of playing to an audience, bowing to commercial sponsorships if you were lucky enough to have them,” Duffy says. “And then the new dimension, which doesn’t have the same precursors in legacy media, which is playing to the algorithm.” A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 62 percent of adults on TikTok are there to find product reviews and recommendations — especially young women.

“Dumb luck” is how Connor Chase explains his 180,000 followers on TikTok — at first he was simply documenting his outfits, posting here and there with few expectations. One day he posted a video showing off a new jacket he got; all of a sudden he had 50,000 new followers.

His followers tune in for fashion and menswear content, and he describes them as a dedicated, loyal audience. But many fashion influencers go through a boom-and-bust cycle, Chase says: You post your cool outfit, blow up and get a lot of views, and then there’s the comedown. Chase knows one way he could juice his views and grow his platform even more.

“I know for a fact if I was to just start buying designer, new stuff, I know my views would skyrocket for sure,” he says. The only creators who can maintain constant growth and relevance are those that constantly share new acquisitions, new designer products, new things for viewers to lust over.

“That is what people want to see. They want to see the new stuff.” Chase’s videos where he shares items in his closet tend to perform well, as does content showing off new purchases. Viewer engagement is the metric that content creators live and die by — followers watching hours and hours of unboxings and hauls ensures influencers will just keep making more of that. If people hate influencers as much as they say, they have a funny way of showing it.

In his Gilded Age-era book The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe the public display and flaunting of luxury items, theorizing that rich people’s indulgences were not just fancy things to buy but were a way to signal social status to those around them. Veblen observed the phenomenon of physical goods serving as overt demonstrations of social power or affluence more than a century ago, and that dynamic is now alive and well on our smartphone screens. Influencers’ promotion of products isn’t just about the physical item and the social class that a fancy camera or a new handbag projects — the fact that they are getting something at all signals that they’ve ascended to a new level for others to aspire to.

Social media sells users the lie of unfettered consumption the same way it sells wannabe influencers the myth of infinite opportunities — that you, too, can join this pioneering class of entrepreneurs following their divine destiny to make bank online. The rhetoric that anyone can do this job is peddled by influencers and marketing firms, naturally, but also by tech companies that are fighting for content and creators themselves. (“There’s no ‘right’ way to use Instagram,” the company, which has almost completely undercut photos for video Reels, says on its creator hub. “Discover the many ways you can make it your own.”) The reality is that there is very little data about the influencer class that is not published by entities with a vested interest in the space, Duffy says.

“There’s the top creators who are earning astounding sums, but most people, according to every survey I’ve seen, are not making enough to earn a living wage,” Duffy says.

Brand deals, especially after the pandemic, are getting harder to come by, according to Duffy. “When you do [get deals], you’re cobbling together money from various income streams. There are some people who are getting money thrown at them for doing seemingly very little work, but for your everyday career creator, it’s incredibly unstable.” Chase says many brands and marketing agencies won’t work with the same influencer twice, so massive is their pool of options; Chase doesn’t expect this job to last forever, but hopes to leverage his internet presence to launch his own clothing company.

Project Pan, as a concept, is both clever and strange. For years, a community of people organized largely on the internet have committed themselves to finishing their beauty and personal care products — the name coming from your promise to hit the bottom of the pan that holds your blush, for example. It’s smart for the way it gamifies something people struggle with. (Who among us doesn’t have half-used bottles of soap or barely touched tubes of lipstick?) It’s also deeply revealing: These products are meant to be used, and we collectively are so bad at finishing them off that we need a little game to make it happen. Off the top of my head I can confidently say that I’ve never once “panned” a compact of blush; I have expensive tubes of red lipstick that didn’t end up being my color, but that I can’t bear to throw out; and I have four bottles of sunscreen that crowd my cabinet, waiting for the summer they’re finally used up. There are many more products that I could — should — Project Pan that I’ve forgotten I even own.

Cassandra Silva, on the other hand, knows exactly what she has. She knows, for example, that she spent $2,857.98 AUD on makeup in 2024 and panned products totaling $1,654.13. She owns eight eyeliners, but her ideal number would be four. In 2023 she panned seven mascaras, 11 colored lip products, and one blush, among many others, all lined up in a photo of the totally empty containers that show her progress. She keeps all this data in a giant spreadsheet that she shares with me after we talk, and as I scroll through it, I realize I have never seen an eyeshadow palette where every color is completely empty.

“Compared to beauty YouTube, it’s not insane insane, but it’s still more than any one human could ever reasonably use,” Silva says of her inventory.

She watches beauty YouTube channels, but needs to be careful about what she consumes: She tries to stay away from content showing off hauls, new releases, or the ever-tempting limited-edition holiday releases.

“I am as conscious as I can be for a makeup addict,” Silva says. “I try, and I am freaking susceptible. It’s so bad.” Recently, a palette of neutral eyeshadows hounded her Instagram feed — she caved and bought it, only to be thoroughly disappointed when it arrived. As a panner, Silva will be stuck with it for years until it’s finished.

Chessie Domrongchai used to make the kind of content that Silva perhaps would steer clear of — she was the one tempting makeup lovers with all of these products. As a beauty YouTuber, Domrongchai shared in-depth product review videos for brands like the once-buzzy direct-to-consumer brand Glossier and tested fistfuls of lip glosses in subtly different shades for her 40,000 subscribers. She shared new releases, compared similar products from different brands, and recommended items for upcoming sales. In a 2019 video, she walks viewers through her pinky-brown nude lipstick collection — 15 shades, not including lip glosses and liquid lipsticks. She followed makeup brands and watched other YouTubers, accumulating more and more products to explore ($10,000, she says, feels like a conservative estimate of the value of her collection at its peak). In makeup, Domrongchai found self-expression, creativity, and community.

Until one day in 2022, when a switch went off in her head.

“I started to view a lot of the overconsumption that I was seeing online as kind of disgusting and wrong, and I recognized a lot of the way that I showed up on the internet was to overconsume,” Domrongchai says. Not only that, but she felt her online presence also influenced viewers to keep buying more and more.

“These are just regular people that are just now stuck with the burden of their overconsumption,” she says. But as a content creator, it was hard to be part of the beauty space without having a constant parade of new products.

In recent months, Domrongchai has developed a new routine for the many products littering her home. One by one, she meticulously peels off stickers and labels: from shampoo and olive oil bottles, from dish soap dispensers and face wash. Using a mix of baking soda, mineral oil, and rubbing alcohol, she goes to town on brand names printed on the packaging of eyeshadow palettes and lipsticks, scrubbing away their origins and the millions of dollars of marketing that went into them — arguably why they are in Domrongchai’s house to begin with. The result is shelves and countertops full of bare bottles and tubes and pumps filled with product but stripped of just about everything else. Watching her videos, I’m slightly horrified at my own ability to recognize the specific products even without all the labeling, the colors and shapes of bottles acting like an afterimage of a CeraVe cleanser.

“Of course I’m going to buy the face cleanser that keeps my skin clear, but I don’t need it to continue to market to me in my own home,” Domrongchai says. “In the past I had three different [lotions] and all of their labels and their marketing on these products … They’re all kind of yelling at you trying to convince you to use it. They’re kind of [in] competition with each other.” In other words, it felt like a social media feed.

For some panners, finishing a product can elicit the same rush that buying something new does — that same dopamine rush of hitting “place order” creeps in when you hit that pan. Then you post it online for other panners to see, adding to the thrill. Finishing products becomes a task to complete, just like shopping is.

“What it can do — which I don’t love to admit to — is you’ll put more blush on than you would,” Silva says. “You just slather it on.” Silva shows me her spreadsheet page from 2024 showing colored lip products she used up: 23. Silva estimates that the average person finishes maybe one lipstick a year. In order to pan that many products, she was reapplying them 15 to 20 times a day, she says. Sometimes Silva wonders if she should ditch panning, too, like she did consumption-focused beauty spaces.

“When you first get into it, it’s so helpful, and you really get that community and you can turn some products over. Then the longer that you’re in the panning community, it’s like, all right, now panning is a problem,” she laughs. “Now I’ve taken all the problems I had with makeup consumption and translated them into late-stage panning. It’s like late-stage capitalism.”

Social media isn’t just filled with ideas for things to buy — increasingly, there are moments where reactionary anti-consumer trends bubble up, too. Project Pan has been around for years but had a resurgence earlier in 2025; “loud budgeting” emerged as a foil to the so-called quiet luxury trend; and the act of owning a normal amount of things (one fancy water bottle, clothes that are several years old) has been rebranded as “underconsumption core.” For a second it seemed like “de-influencing” had some legs — until inevitably the de-influencers started promoting other things to buy instead. Even the mechanisms for buying less can prompt people into shopping more. When there is shopping fatigue, things eventually swing back. Duffy says creators often describe how TikTok rewards educational content, but that even that genre has consumption at its center.

“There’s always been advertising packaged as advice,” Duffy says, pointing back to things like women’s magazines. “But in the context of TikTok, you had so many people that were sharing their tips and tricks on life with consumer purchases at the center.”

Pilates, in its most stripped-down form, requires only a mat and your body weight — no fancy equipment, no coordinating workout clothing, and no membership to an invite-only studio. But as Pilates has exploded in popularity, the practice and the idealized life that includes it has a new protagonist: the Pilates Princess. She is clean, thin, ritualistic, and has nothing but time for herself — a Patrick Bateman for people with Pinterest manifestation boards. She is also, importantly, a key consumer group: for fashion brands releasing entire collections of garments named after her, for Spotify Wrapped, which included a “Pink Pilates Princess” listener category in 2024, and for tech gadgets like Oura rings or Apple AirPods Max, which are regularly featured in Pilates Princess content. There are plenty of people who do Pilates without the consumerism, of course — but the practice that was originally developed in a cell is now in a new, more shoppable cage of its own.

It’s hard to imagine what a social network not centered around shopping would even look like (some apps, like the now-defunct Flip, did away with the “social” pretenses and just made a feed full of ads). And even if there was an intentional effort to veer away from unmitigated consumption, it’s not clear if users — who in the same breath decry these habits — would care. Shopping addiction or compulsive buying is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as an official diagnosis, but there is research from around the world about its prevalence, including what role game-like social media apps play.

Overconsumption didn’t begin with social media or TikTok, but it did get a turbocharge from these platforms with a vested interest in our shopping habits. Creators, brands, and advertisers have known it for a while, but now it feels unignorable from the audience’s perspective: There are vanishingly few ways to be online that don’t involve you becoming a billboard. The internet once promised the democratization of information, power, and free expression. As advertiser-first algorithms take hold, careful not to promote anything that might stray from brand safety, we are mostly left with a very long shopping list. The companies making money on all of this have made content creation seem scintillating: walls of PR boxes, flexible schedules, an alternative to the concept of work that was upended during the pandemic and still hasn’t recovered. The idea that anyone can create actually means that anyone can promote.

The day before we spoke in May 2025, Elysia Berman paid off the last dollar on her $50,000 of debt. TikTok, ironically, helped her cross the finish line: Berman made thousands as part of the platform’s creator fund, which she redirected to pay down her debt.

“It’s TikTok’s fault that I’ve gotten in this mess, so I like that TikTok’s helping me pay it off,” she says.

Berman says she is careful about what she posts, mindful that she too could be influencing someone else. Her history with problematic shopping is an undercurrent through much of her content — she offers tips for people who want to find their personal style without buying impulsively. But some of her videos are undoubtedly centered around consumption: what to buy in the Sephora sale, unique fragrance recommendations, seven of her favorite black boots.

Then again, viewers eager for an impulse purchase will see a shopping list even where there isn’t one. In a video from September, Berman talks about breaking free from the burdens of compulsive shopping: not worrying about how she’ll pay for something, not obsessively tracking packages she’s expecting, going on a trip without worrying about money. Berman was selling something intangible — a healthy relationship with your possessions — and many thanked her for it. But even that video had real commercial potential. A few comments asked what eyeshadow she was wearing; another asked where her necklace was from. In her quest to inspire people to break free from mass consumption, she too had become a billboard.