via @davis.clarke
Davis Clarke has garnered over 700,000 followers for his hilariously vague and overzealous front-facing corporate motivation videos. He spouts off phrases like “Locked in for greatness today… because it is time to absolutely hammer some Excel spreadsheets,” or “It was a dominant performance on this beautiful Monday… nothing out of the ordinary though… because that’s what the heavy hitters expect,” all while beaming in his business casual. He positions himself as a sort of Tony Robbins-esque motivational speaker, if Tony Robbins’s native tongue was corporate brospeak. Of course, almost nobody takes him seriously. The comments on Clarke’s videos almost all poke fun at him, assuming he’s not in on the joke. He’s a corporate lolcow (someone you milk for lols online), epitomizing what can be so cringy about that kind of “grind” culture. He uses sports metaphors to speak about office work, and the juxtaposition emphasizes its ridiculousness. He tries his best to make his job not sound boring, but it just ends up seeming absurd. What does it mean exactly to “hammer” a spreadsheet? That sounds like it would hurt. But Davis’s success, at least in terms of views, says something about how the online generation views the workplace.
via @davis.clarke
The heart of the problem is that the 9-to-5 office lifestyle is an increasingly hard dream to sell, especially to young people. After 2020, the idea of clocking into an office every day seems like a hazy vision from the past, one that might have been a bad idea in the first place. The widespread popularization of remote employment showed workers that they can have flexibility and freedom. They can take their dog on a walk and make lunch instead of spending hours commuting and shelling out $20 for a to-go salad. Even more than the logistics of working in an office, a large swath of young people have become disillusioned by the very idea of committing so much of one’s life to a job. With the knowledge that everything you know and love can be ripped away in an instant, it was harder to sell the idea of dedicating a large chunk of your identity and time to your job. Of course, none of this has changed the need to work. That’s not going away any time soon. What is slowly disappearing, though, is the kind of zealous fealty to our workplaces that influencers like Davis Clarke peddle. So when we see someone in a shirt and tie talking about “locking in,” we know how ridiculous it is, so we laugh and press like, which in turn only fuels this kind of content.
via @hubs.life_
Connor Hubbard, another 9-to-5 influencer, epitomizes another reason why this content is so hard to swallow. He rose to notoriety in 2024, making the norm-est of normcore morning routine videos. He wakes up early, slides his laptop into his backpack with careful aplomb, and spends all day in a cubicle doing… something. It’s not quite clear what. Then he returns home to microwave a premade dinner and play with his dog. Viewers responded to his attempt to give the 9-to-5 a more cinematic treatment. To some, it was an antidote to all the highly unrealistic morning routines that constantly flood our feeds—the ones where influencers rise at the crack of dawn to plunge their faces in ice and hit at least six hours at the gym. Hubbard lent that same high-shine style to the types of mornings that millions of people actually have, without Davis’ easy-to-make-fun-of schtick.
But with Hubbard’s success came a natural pivot. With the attention and subsequent brand deals that come with online fame, he no longer had the need for the 9-to-5 that earned him his success. His videos nowadays try to emulate the same style, but instead of being titled “Life at 30 working a nine to five job,” they’re titled “self-employed morning routine.” And like any good full-time influencer, he’s got a red light mask on at 4 AM. His story is the perfect example of why this type of content doesn’t ultimately work. How can we believe him when he said that his normal job was good after he gave it up to become an influencer at the first chance? His entire ethos is undercut by this admission. His pivot suggests a more grim outlook on work. Sure, you can make do with what you have, but wouldn’t you rather not have to?
via @hubs.life_
This is the influencer trap. They sell you a life that you can only live if your job is to post about your life. All categories of this content, from travel to beauty to fitness, sell you a dream that is fundamentally unattainable. Their grift becomes transparent once you know how to look for it.
Though these 9-to-5 influencers might think that they’re motivating or romanticizing their lifestyles, what they really are is reifying our abandonment of them by pointing out their absurdity. Davis, by parodying (either knowingly or unknowingly) the kind of person whose entire personality is their corporate job, and Hubbard by showing that romanticizing only goes so far. They’re both on unsteady ground in their own ways. But so is the state of work in this country.