Connor Hubbard might be the most boring man on the internet. The 29-year-old dresses like a generic white guy, lives in a nice but unremarkable house in the Dallas, Texas, suburbs and works a 9-5 in insurance. He “lives for” his morning coffee and loves going to the gym after work and watching TV in the evening. He is perfectly happy with his mundane existence – which includes a wife, a dog and a baby on the way – and does not aspire to anything more. The internet is obsessed with him.
Every few months one of Hubbard’s slice-of-an-ordinary-life videos goes viral eliciting extreme reactions. A Rorschach test of sorts, half of the viewers seem to think his world is morbidly depressing (“what is the point of even living?” one person asked), while the other half thinks it is hugely aspirational. Under the comment section of the latest video to go viral, people are having heated debates about whether the man is a role model or a cautionary tale.
Hubbard, I should note, has clearly engineered his videos to generate these reactions. The man isn’t just an insurance bro whose videos urge people to take joy in a simple life and “normalize the norm”. He has developed a lucrative content creation side hustle: his TikTok channel has almost half a million subscribers and he’s got a number of partnerships with big brands.
He has hit upon a successful formula for viral success, juxtaposing his extremely ordinary routine with eerie and often melancholy music, giving the clips an unheimlich feel. Sometimes he uses soundtracks from films like American Beauty and Donnie Darko which feature middle-class people in the suburbs who have breakdowns. He’s saying his life is great, but the vibes are saying otherwise.
Still, while there may a degree of algorithmic artistry behind Hubbard’s viral videos, the fact they provoke such a visceral response says a lot about shifting attitudes towards what is considered a “desirable” life among a younger generation. They encapsulate a widespread tension about the world of work and the nature of ambition.
A few years after the 2008 recession, the rich world entered its Follow/Find Your Passion era. For years young people were inundated with messages that having a regular 9-5 job was for losers. No, you had to love what you did. And because you loved what you did, you should make it your entire identity; you should hustle, hustle, hustle 24 hours a day. Being an entrepreneur was considered one of the most desirable career paths there was. Working for someone else felt second-rate.
That era started losing steam in 2016 when Elizabeth Holmes, a hero of #girlboss and hustle culture, was revealed to be a fraud. The obsession with finding your passion then arguably sputtered to a standstill in 2019. It’s demise epitomized, perhaps, by WeWork – whose co-working spaces featured mugs with slogans like “Do what you love” – slashing its workforce and going from startup darling to financial wreck.
The pandemic, of course, then put the final nail in the coffin of the do-what-you-love era. Attitudes towards ambition shifted; there was what Julia Hobsbawm, a consultant and author of The Nowhere Office, a “great re-evaluation”. The shock of the pandemic caused people to reassess their priorities and seek more of a work-life balance. “Is this the end of ambition?” a 2022 Guardian piece asked.
Not quite, but the nature of ambition has fundamentally changed. In an increasingly precarious world, stability has become a luxury item. Studies show gen Z prioritizes long-term financial security over climbing a career ladder, and 85% of 2023 grads said stability was the important thing they considered when applying to a job according to a report by the networking company Handshake. That’s a break from the past: traditionally things like pay and brand name have been more important to new jobseekers.
Once upon a time having a house, a couple of kids and a “boring” 9-5 with decent benefits might have felt dull. Increasingly, however, this modest American dream feels out-of-reach. US housing affordability is at record lows; childcare is not considered affordable in any state; food prices have risen at the highest rate in decades. Layoffs are rampant and more companies are reducing their full-time workforce and hiring contract workers – who don’t get benefits. As for retirement? That feels like a pipe dream now. Pension plans went away when millennials were in elementary school and many millennials are resigned to the idea that they’ll have to work for the rest of their lives.
And then, of course, there’s the wider geopolitical context. Political upheaval around the world; the climate crisis; rise of authoritarianism. “There was no point in the Trump years that felt quite as bleak as this one, because even the fool’s hope of something better has vanished now,” the writer Dan Sheehan recently tweeted alongside a collage of headlines about genocide, deportations and increase in oil drilling permits. The melancholic music that Hubbard uses as a background to the videos of his ordinary life feels like the soundtrack to modern life.
Precarity is the defining condition of our time. Stability has become a privilege: a regular 9-5 feels like something solid to cling to in a time of upheaval and uncertainty. Is it any wonder so many people are drawn to videos of a man going through the motions of a life that feels both reassuringly stable and increasingly unobtainable?
