Breaking news: My habit of using internet personalities as emotional coping mechanisms has worsened. I was recently talking to my friend (hi, Wendy!) about which influencers we’re currently fixating on. Wendy mentioned that she’d been dipping into the world of Emma Chamberlain during some late-night YouTube spirals—a subculture (or monoculture, I guess) that I admittedly knew little about. In an attempt to point my fixations in a new direction, I wandered on over to her channel.
Modern YouTube is a flavor of hell I’d yet to fully taste. I’m more familiar with its pedagogical corners: How to Hang a Shelf, Are These Lemon Bars Supposed to Be Brown, etc. Occasionally I’ll look up a culturally relevant music video or a beginner’s yoga class that I’ll give up on after 20 minutes. For context, this is my recent YouTube search history:
As a ~millennial~, I didn’t grow up with the candy-colored quick-cut vlogs by teenagers with access to expensive camera equipment (my exposure to that type of person would come later, when I attended art school). The most invested I’ve been in YouTube personalities was probably back in 2008, when I would watch the occasional Shane Dawson music video parody on my friend’s desktop computer so we could pass the time until The Sims loaded. Cut to 2020, and Shane Dawson is rightfully called out for using blackface liberally in his videos, dropping the n-word like it’s nothing, and possibly having sex with his cat. (The Sims, on the other hand? Flawless and timeless.)
I knew that the cultural landscape of YouTube had obviously changed from my days of trying to kill time between loading screens. I knew that people watch YouTube videos more than they watch TV, and that there was something called a JoJo Siwa, but beyond that, not much. So once I found out that there was a well of content there that could scratch the itch I usually reserve for reality TV stars, scammers, and influencers, I had no choice but to go to Emma Chamberlain’s page and click on on the video that promised the most voyeurism: “WHAT MY LIFE IS REALLY LIKE.”
Emma in her soulless bathroom (courtesy of YouTube).
It only takes a few minutes to get the gist of the Chamberlain experience. Emma is relatively unfiltered for a YouTuber with 9.2 million subscribers. She doesn’t seem beholden to ring light staging (I couldn’t spot the tell-tale pupil halo), and she has a lexicon resplendent with “dudes” and “what the fucks.” As far as what I assume hooks her young viewers, she’s relatable in a glossy, marketed sort of way. She complains about her addiction to coffee, then goes on to plug her Chamberlain Coffee brand as she makes cold brew in a Mason jar the size of my head. She shows off her acne unabashedly, then seamlessly segues into her brand partnership with Bliss as she shows us her skincare routine in her Brutalist gray bathroom.
But as I watched her flit between making self-branded coffee, opening boxes of clothing she either ordered or was gifted, and playing Fortnite, the true protagonist of the video became clear: Her enormous, echoey West Hollywood mansion. Emma, a 5’4” nineteen-year-old, looks like a Gen Z Polly Pocket as she tromps down her wide, slatted staircase and opens her gargantuan refrigerator filled with vegan creamer. Her voices echoes in her open-concept kitchen/dining space as she jokes about how YouTubers’ favorite phrase is “life update!”, before proceeding to give us updates on her life. The rooms and halls are full of sharp corners and 90-degree angles, and even her outdoor space is shaded by square juts of concrete roofing. If this were a house for tech moguls with two to four children, the space would seem like more of a fit. But for a teenager living alone (even a teenager allegedly worth $8 million), the mansion seems like a recipe for many lonely nights.
Naturally, I had to message Wendy.
Me: need you to know that I watched my first emma chamberlain video and now I’m obsessed with her big creepy empty house and might write about that next!
Wendy: Her house is so big and creepy - why is it that big? Why does she live alone there as a teen? Why am I obsessed with her *~glamour~* but also constantly assessing whether or not she’s stunted in the life-skills department, because she’s so young and prioritizing other things? […] Is she missing out on some experiences? Or does it not matter? What is her character like?
Me: exactly - what skills would she have to fall back on should youtube get compromised by overseas hackers, deleting her livelihood and leaving her just like the rest of us? she opened her fridge in the vid and it was… full to the brim with nothing but vegan creamer. like she was living in a staged home that was sponsored by Big Creamer
Wendy: What a different world, that somehow sustains itself on its own relatability, but not a single person is actually relatable?
*edited for punctuation and brevity*
That’s the crux of what so deeply unsettled me about the video: the performance of “relatability,” staged in a massively unrelatable setting. As the bank accounts of YouTubers like Emma swell with advertising deals and brand partnerships, how can they maintain the illusion that once used to be true: that they’re regular teenagers, just like their viewers?
Emma is merely one of many YouTubers who’ve decided to put some of their excess wealth towards a needlessly mammoth mansion, while still claiming relatability. Social media icon Jake Paul (blech), for example, owns an entire estate that’s three times the size of Emma’s, with room to spare. The home, to use the term loosely, sits on 3.5 acres and features eight bedrooms, a massive home theater, and a bathroom with a built-in aromatherapy shower. Just big enough to throw a 100-person party in the middle of a pandemic or try to hide your military-grade weapons from the FBI!
Jake Paul’s den of bigotry (courtesy of Business Insider).
Emma’s series of concrete blocks (courtesy of the LA Times).
Comparably, Emma’s $4 million home is downright modest. Yet there’s something about her obvious domestic solitude, especially during the COVID era, that fascinates and depresses me. Maybe it’s her big, neutral bedroom punctuated only by a king-sized bed with white sheets, which looks out over a twinkling Los Angeles at night. Or that her ceilings are so tall that her artwork and shelving only reach about halfway up the walls, presumably to avoid neck pain. Something about the whole thing feels deeply American. Capitalism teaches us to prioritize the accrual of wealth over everything else. Does that mean sacrificing feeling at home for the sake of square footage?
In another video, Emma finally hosts a visitor: her mom. Towards the end, after Emma yet again has walked us through an average day in her life at home, she takes the viewers out into her backyard to have a look at her pool. Mama Chamberlain waves and smiles, seemingly happy to see Emma in her vloggy element. Emma seems thrilled to have the company. “I’ve actually never been in my pool,” she admits.
She goes back inside, comes out in a full-on wetsuit, and has her mom grab her a boogie board. She wades in and says, “My feet are completely numb.” It’s safe to assume her pool has never been heated before. She shivers and has her mom count her down to help work up the courage to jump in. “One, two… two and a half… two and three quarters… three!”
She screams and dives in, emerging on the other side none the happier. Later, as she walks us through her nighttime skincare routine, she admits, “Well, this isn’t the most boring day of my life. At least I can say I jumped in the pool.”