Aesthetica

by Allie Rowbottom

I had reason to believe I could touch stardom, and the money that came with it, as a model on Instagram. This is what I’d told my mother, how I’d sold her on my move to LA. Instagram was a business opportunity, a new frontier for entrepreneurial youths like me, youths with initiative. College stifled that sort of thing and I had read online that even rich kids were taking gap years to experience the real world. I had read that student debt was shackling my generation, condemning us to the same hardship I watched my mother weather, month by month, a running list of questions: which bills needed paying, which she could put off, what could she forego. Travel, therapy, dental work. The real world, shrunken by lack. But technology was wide open. It was where the money was. Influencers with one hundred thousand followers earned a thousand dollars a post, easy. Two hundred thousand followers equaled paid vacations to five-star resorts. Almost foolish, to want to do anything else.