For nearly two decades, people across the globe have been uploading snippets of their lives onto YouTube.
Since 2005, the platform has greatly evolved, and now thousands of people make their living by sharing facets of their lives online. Among these people is Nikocado Avocado.
Nicholas Perry is the man behind the Avocado branding, but before that, he played violin at Carnegie Hall. When he started his channel, it was all about the violin and his vegan lifestyle. After two years of lifestyle content, Perry adopted a popular trend in Asia: the mukbang.
Mukbang as in eating a ridiculous amount of usually unhealthy food in one sitting, typically while telling a story or commenting on a news event.
Perry found great success with the content, quickly gaining millions of subscribers. People saw his loss of veganism and increased portion size as a cause for concern, but in 2016 that was only the beginning.
As we now know Perry, his weight has increased since his vegan days. Or, rather, it had.
On Sept. 19, Perry posted a video titled “Two Steps Ahead” where he describes how his villainous story had just been a social experiment and a successful one at that.
Perry pre-recorded two years worth of videos and slowly released them on his channel. During this time, he lost over 250 pounds. Let’s just say the shock of “Two Steps Ahead” was strong.
That reveal video has garnered 44 million views and has been shared on all social media platforms hundreds of times.
There has been plenty of speculation that this video was recorded years ago before he gained a lot of weight. This has been debunked, though, as it’s impossible Perry could have predicted Charli XCX’s “brat” summer TikTok dance, which he posted earlier this week.
So approaches the reality of the internet. How do we as media consumers know what we are seeing is real? The answer is we don’t.
No one had figured out that Perry was successfully pursuing weight loss, and the truth is no one needed to.
The downfall of being a public figure is your audience. The audience creates a celebrity’s career, and some members feel entitled to be part of their life in return.
Famous people are just that: people. People are entitled to their privacy, whether or not they became famous through sharing their life.
Nikocado Avocado does not have to detail his weight loss, his mental health or his relationship status because those things are personal. They are his, not ours.
Parasocial relationships are inherently toxic, not just for the viewer but also the creator. Fan theories are fun and all until you start to believe they are actually real.
Walk away from the computer. Go meet people in real life to form actual, genuine relationships with. Leave the prying to the tabloids.
