“Life sucks, coffee helps”: Articulating the authentic entrepreneur on YouTube's girlboss channels

When thinking about the current neoliberal brand-culture, where social media enhance and enable (Carah & Angus, 2018) entrepreneurs like Sophia Amoruso to publicly share their thoughts and sell their brands, it is good to keep in mind that the current logic and form of brands were created in the 1980s, when management theorists turned their focus from developing products to developing brands (Arvidsson, 2006; Bookman, 2016; Klein, 1999). This shift from product to brands paved way for the self-branding that has become a penetrating force within the advanced capitalist political economy (Arvidsson, 2006; Bookman, 2016). Further, the rupture of the old media landscape and the rise of user-generated content have enabled the production and consumption of media content that benefits from “ordinary” people and their “ordinary” lives (e.g., Ashton & Patel, 2017; Cunningham & Craig, 2017; Noppari & Hautakangas, 2012; Torjesen, 2021): that is, self-brands, such as girlbosses, operating in different media environments and based on product–consumer relationships where the individual self-brand recognises its role in the production of the brand. The representation of the self has become part of an identity that is produced on different social media platforms both for oneself and others (Scolere et al., 2018).

In the context of girlbosses – and other social media workers – representing the self is often aligned with the discourse of passion, which enables entrepreneurs to find meaning for their lives through work that doesn’t seem like work (Duffy & Hund, 2015). For example, many YouTubers show how their leisure and work blend seamlessly, such as through meetings in collaboration parties, photoshoots in foreign countries, and the ability to work from home or at fashionable cafés. On the other hand, the type of admiration and practice of bonding among girlbosses also echoes typically masculine start-up entrepreneurialism, in which the identity is constructed as “a rock star, vital entrepreneur, and buddy in a start-up ecosystem” (Katila et al., 2019: 381). Many girlbosses articulate an identity that is based on circulating out-dated, typically masculine meanings connected to entrepreneurship, such as competitiveness, success, and heroism (Katila et al., 2019). Passionate self-accentuating speeches, open pursuit of bigger pay checks, and usage of “bad language” among girlbosses resemble the confidence quest that Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) discussed in Empowered – that is, in popular feminism, the empowerment of women is seen as the mastery of confidence that leads to capitalist success (Banet-Weiser, 2018).

The fact that the entrepreneurial girlboss trend has empowered millennial women through different media technologies and working opportunities – for example, assuming power in places where women have historically been left out – is nothing new. Before bloggers, vloggers, and lifestyle-YouTubers existed, women's magazines inspired women to share information and build communities (Peiss, 1998; Wolf, 1992). Communities have also been built within families, between neighbours, and at workplaces, by sharing information about beauty, fashion, politics, and so on (Peiss, 1998). Going as far back as seventeenth-century Europe, where most countries banned women from accessing the public hotspots of culture and politics, for example, coffee houses (see Tucker, 2016), women invited each other to one another's homes instead, for coffee and exchange of information (Saarinen, 2011). Men often dismissed these meetups as meant for gossip, but for women, the coffee gatherings were a means to stay ahead of things and get organised before having the right to vote and taking part in political decision-making (Saarinen, 2011).

In the construction of a successful self-brand, the most prominent feature seems to be branding the self as authentic – that is, commercialisation and performance of the authentic are necessary parts of the modern “success myth” (see Dyer, 1998) of the self-brand (e.g., Ashton & Patel, 2017; Banet-Weiser, 2012; Cunningham & Craig, 2017; Pooley, 2010; Shtern et al., 2019). Representing and performing the authentic self operates as a means to achieve entrepreneurial goals in a publicly acceptable manner. The desire for fame and self-branding also seems to be a consequence of a society where success appears to offer enormous material, economic, social, and physical rewards (e.g., Jerslev, 2016; Marwick, 2013).

However, the quest for authenticity has also been connected to deeper, ontological dilemmas. For example, Charles Taylor (1989) has argued that, compared to previous civilisations, many contemporaries are not ready to choose between theistic and secular perceptions of existence, and that in modern society, life becomes spiritually senseless if there is no framework; thus, the quest for meaning is always a quest for sense. Moreover, Taylor (1991) has outlined three major fears that frame modern life: losing meaning, losing purpose for the primacy of instrumental reason, and losing freedom. As a result, for some, the answer to these fears is turning to authenticity as a moral principle. According to Taylor (1991), authenticity grants some individuals an anchor for their inner selves, when they follow and express their true calling.

These thoughts have sparked much debate; for example, Jefferson Pooley (2010: 82) argues that the ideal of authenticity as way toward finding one's “true self” results only in “calculated authenticity” that enforces the performative nature of authenticity that is amplified by the market of advertising and self-help culture (see also Shtern et al., 2019). In turn, Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) considers authenticity a result of the commercial practice of cultural participation within a neoliberal media environment, where self-branding becomes the essential element of maintaining the broader landscape of brand culture. Further, within an ambivalent cultural system of self-branding, to access authenticity, one must first and foremost be “true to others” (Banet-Weiser, 2012).

To be clear, I do not claim there is a “pure” state or way of being that is ideally authentic. As Pooley (2010) argues, the tension between the self-fulfillment ideal and the injunction to work on oneself as an object is a productive contradiction. According to Pooley, all social action is performative, and therefore there is no such thing as nonperformative “authentic” self-closure on social media or in person. However, I do claim that in a modern society, where fears of losing meaning and freedom make people anxious (Taylor, 1991), there is a need to believe that a place, or a moral state of nonperformative authenticity, really exists. In other words, the moral ideal or pursuit of authenticity should not be regarded as merely “calculated authenticity” caused by the “authenticity bind” (Pooley, 2010), nor as part of the relational work between content creators and content consumers (Shtern et al., 2019), nor as an ambivalent process of commercial cultural practice (Banet-Weiser, 2012), but also as a need, an experience of optimism, that drives people toward “the good life” (Berlant, 2011).

According to Berlant, in optimism, the subject leans toward promises contained within the present moment of the encounter with their object. In the case of girlbosses, optimism involves the promise that authenticity will result in happiness and meaning. However, the promise of authenticity also creates a cruel dilemma: Since people always express themselves in relation to others, an attachment to authenticity becomes problematic when the one pursuing it realises it is never pure or disconnected from context. Therefore, in this article, I approach the question of authenticity from two perspectives: On the one hand, authenticity is understood as part – and a prerequisite – of the success of the self-brand in the digital media industry, and on the other, authenticity is understood with respect to “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011), where the promise of authenticity is expected to be the key to happiness. Yet, in a cruel way, this promise also prevents itself from actualising.

The data suggest that the idea of self-made success, like that of Sophia Amoruso, is represented repeatedly on YouTube's girlboss channels. Recurring coffee imagery – such as videos and images of coffee, coffee mugs, coffee drinking, and working in cafés – articulates a productive entrepreneurial life. In one example (see Figure 1), coffee, a coffee mug with empowering text, and the advice the girlboss shares with her audience are ways to manage the self, the business, and “do everything”.

Figure 1

Accordingly, one of the interviewees, who has a YouTube-channel and works as a freelance video editor, says that sharing coffee imagery is often connected to productivity and managing the self:

Well, I think it's like the stereotype girlboss. I think that's honestly the reason why, because, like, you know those really cheesy Pinterest quotes? I definitely have some of them saved from, like, three years ago, when it was like “Coffee, messy bun, and wi-fi, and I take on the world!”

When I asked the interviewee to elaborate why coffee, rather than other things, is so important to girlbosses, she continued:

I think as a girlboss it's cos […] our obsession with productivity or […] this whole girlboss-narrative and how it's, you know, a lie. Or productivity and the girlboss-life is so glamorised, when it really isn’t. And I think […] coffee […] makes you productive, and productivity is so celebrated in the whole girlboss-thing. You know, like hustling, doing the work, and yeah, that's why I think coffee [is so important].

The “hustling” life that Interviewee 3 described, as supported by my empirical data, is a life in which a girlboss starts her morning routine with a cup of coffee that she drinks from her inspirational coffee mug that says, for example, “I am not bossy, I am the boss” (see Figure 1); “Good things come to those who work their asses off”; or “Girlboss”; to mention a few. Both the drink itself and the inspirational mugs represent the efforts that productive girlbosses make to set the pace for the day and succeed. Thanks to the stimulating and refreshing effect of caffeine, coffee has been connected to productivity since it was invented around the eleventh century in Arabia (Saarinen, 2011). For example, in Finland, a country whose people drink the most coffee per capita, coffee has been a major part of work culture since the eighteenth century, when coffee was given to servants, farmers, and field workers to keep them working and satisfied with their employers (Saarinen, 2011).

According to Harsh Verma (2013), who has studied coffee and tea consumption in India, coffee has both functional and symbolic value. On the one hand, coffee is the caffeinated drink that helps people manage their working lives when needing an extra boost; in this context, coffee is valued for delivery at the physiological level. On the other hand, coffee can signal a break away from the ordinary, and its consumption is tied to special occasions and people in the hierarchy of relationships. Further, Sonia Bookman (2014, 2016), who has studied coffee culture and branding in Canada, argues that the growing significance of coffee brands in the urban environment, such as Starbucks, is related to the prominence of the symbolic economy in the so-called entrepreneurial city. That is, the centrality of consumer culture, as well as the concurrent emergence of the brand as a powerful market and cultural form, are factors that play a significant role in the branding of urban life (Bookman, 2014).

In the girlboss context, coffee articulates both its different values and its significance as a brand forming the entrepreneurial life.

Coffee's functional value is evident in girlboss content, which connects coffee preparing, pouring, holding, and drinking with the act of working. Whether it be vlogs, routine videos, or Instagram stories and images, girlbosses show themselves having coffee in different working situations during the day to articulate their productivity. As the screenshot in Figure 2 shows, coffee and productiveness are evident on a vlog that represents both authenticity (i.e., what something looks like) and productivity (i.e., the working week). The image of the girlboss waiting for a subway while holding a Starbucks takeaway coffee also symbolises the twenty-four/seven worker constantly on the go and playing her part in the “entrepreneurial city” (Bookman, 2014). Coffee's symbolic value, on the other hand, is evident in videos and images, where inspirational coffee mugs, cafés, quotes, and so on, themselves articulate the daily life of productive entrepreneurs. Posting a coffee-related quote, such as “First I drink coffee, then I do the things”, on Instagram, for example, implies that the girlboss is productive and successful.

Figure 2

Coffee drinking also extends to the realm of social engagements and indulgence (Saarinen, 2011; Verma, 2013) – that is, being able to take time for oneself during a work week and going to a café, for example, are some benefits of being one's own boss. A close-up photo (see Figure 3) of special kinds of coffee and luxury-brand bags, as well as descriptions and hashtags (e.g., #productphotography, #luxuryblogger, #girlboss), articulate that, if you work hard, you can have indulgent breaks and purchase expensive designer items.

Figure 3

This type of “Instagrammable” imagery of aesthetically pleasing cafés, hotels, and special coffee connected to the luxury and freedom of being one's own boss also articulates zeal toward the things girlbosses do. The idea of “passion” (Duffy & Hund, 2015) enables content creators to depict a notion of work that doesn’t seem like work.

However, because the platform-specific self-brand (Scolere et al., 2018) requires impression management that first and foremost benefits the brand, there are certain things that girlbosses obscure. As Interviewee 3 described in the quote earlier, “productivity and the girlboss-life is so glamorised, when it really isn’t”. This, she explained, means that even though girlbosses are authentic and productive, there are many issues they do not reveal. On that note, when I asked Interviewee 3 why she herself shared her life so openly, she emphasised the connection between passion and creativity, while also making sure that she could “use and leverage” the audience she is building on YouTube.

Accordingly, it seems that girlbossness is a constant negotiation of what to share. This negotiation is connected to girlbosses’ own understandings of You-Tube's and Instagram's algorithmic processes and how they impact the visibility of their content. That is, creating “authentic” videos and images of productive working routines and daily entrepreneur life implies that girlbosses know how to customise their self-brand to the lifestyles of their audience, because self-branding is seen not as an imposition of product by corporate culture but rather as the individual taking on the project herself to access her “true self” (Banet-Weiser, 2018). On the other hand, girlbosses are aware of the ideal representations of productive entrepreneurs, and how posting images of themselves drinking coffee while working, or using trendy keywords like “girlboss”, can increase visibility and income.

Among girlbosses, authenticity is often articulated through homely content, such as publishing videos of preparing coffee in the morning, sharing intimate things about their personal life, or showing how she takes care of herself by spending time with her pet. These representations function as frames for ordinariness and relatability; after all, many of us drink coffee in the morning in our pyjamas.

In one example (see Figure 4), a girlboss invites her followers to have a look “behind the curtain” and find out what entrepreneurship is “really like”. In the image, the girlboss is on her messy bed drinking coffee and petting her dog.

Figure 4

Here, the coffee mug, dog, and image description are used to create a relatable feeling of an ordinary life off-camera. However, while girlbosses depict authenticity and ordinariness online, there is a difference in which parts of the self are shown and on which platform. Studies show that digital users react to the reality of collapsed contexts by introducing various socially mediated selves that vary between and across different social media platforms (Scolere et al., 2018).

For example, Interviewee 3 explained that for her, YouTube is “the place to be found and to attract people”, because it is the second-largest search engine after Google. YouTube is also the place to share personal things and give value to the audience, whereas Instagram is mainly the place to engage people and beat the algorithm with “beautiful pictures”. On the other hand, Interviewee 2, who works as a travel and lifestyle content creator and loves Instagram's edited travel-photographs, explained that for her, Instagram stories – rather than YouTube – is the place to be “completely unfiltered”. Instagram stories makes it easy to “just grab the camera and be spontaneous” without the hassle of editing. For Interviewee 1, who has a growing beauty brand along with her YouTube channel, sharing on social media resembles behaviour with different friends and acquaintances. That is, things are shared with some more than others, and certain things are not for sharing at all.

Articulating authenticity is a constant negotiation between different selves. On the one hand, girlbosses and their audiences want to be inspired by beautiful, edited, and positive content. On the other hand, girlbosses want to create and consume content that is relatable and “real”, revealing what the well-decorated home looks like when not filming, or how difficult and consuming it can be to be an entrepreneur, for example. As one girlboss explained in her video (see Figure 5), being an entrepreneur is not always easy. Showing a coffee mug with the text “Have a break” not only implies coffee's functional value as a refreshment when one gets tired during work, but the mug and its text also have symbolic meanings that connect coffee with comfort, self-care, and ordinariness – the common feeling of needing time off when life gets tough. Or, as Interviewee 3 told me, when I asked why coffee is so important to girlbosses, “I think it's just cos, obviously coffee kind of also… helps, like, ‘life sucks, coffee helps’”.

Figure 5

This way to represent authenticity resembles that of celebrity culture. Fandom and the construction of stars and celebrities have always involved a search for the authentic person that lies behind the manufactured mask of fame (Dyer, 1998). However, instead of following Hollywood stars like people did in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, today people often admire microcelebrities and social media influencers (Abidin, 2016; Jerslev, 2016; Marwick, 2013), who don’t unveil their ordinary lives on special issues of magazines or late-night television shows, for example, but build their careers on showing themselves all the time.

As Interviewee 2 explained, to succeed on social media, one needs to be inspirational and share “what is happening in the background”, because “that actually interests people”. That is, inspiration is not only something ideal to look up to but also something that, at least seems to be, within reach for the audience as well. When a girlboss unveils parts of their ordinary life, entrepreneurship can seem more relatable than, for example, watching a Hollywood star's success story on television. This “real” sharing, according to my data, is what makes “authentic” social media entrepreneurs so popular.

Accordingly, among girlbosses, creativity, uniqueness, and “standing out from the crowd” are admired features. On the other hand, people also value ordinary, relatable, and authentic life on social media. The problem, though, is that there is conflict, even confusion, about what ordinary life is. For example, Interviewee 1 explained that the reason for starting her girlboss channel was because she felt unhappy:

I was sad and didn’t know what I wanted from life. And to be honest, I Googled […] how to be happy […] then I found one video from a YouTuber that was titled “How to be happy”. I […] was just really inspired by that person and thought, “Wow, what a great idea” […] and that is how my journey began.

As the quote above exemplifies, representing and performing the authentic self operates as a means to achieve entrepreneurial goals in a publicly acceptable manner. That is, sharing “inspirational” and honest content through homely videos and images of one's morning routines and difficulties articulates that authenticity can lead to successful entrepreneurship. Further, sharing these inspirational representations are also efforts to pursue the ordinary, authentic self that entails a promise of happiness and “the good life” (Berlant, 2011: 2).

While girlbosses use coffee imagery to represent their passion-driven productivity and pursuit of ordinariness and authenticity, they also use this imagery to depict sociability and belonging. Images and videos of sitting on a couch while talking to the camera, taking the audience through their daily life through vlogs, or posting empowering quotes create a feeling of intimacy (Berlant, 1998) while not having physical contact with the audience or co-entrepreneurs.

As early as the seventeenth century, coffee has been associated with habits and social hierarchies. The quality of the coffee, the manner in which one drank coffee, and the tableware one used to serve coffee, for example, articulated a person's social class and cultural background. Also, social coffee drinking has traditionally been more of a women's than a men's habit, having its roots in a time when women were not allowed public places such as cafés (Saarinen, 2011).

In girlboss entrepreneurship, coffee is persistent on all the analysed channels. For example, many girlbosses have particular YouTube vlog-types and Instagram-livecasts named after coffee, such as “Coffee Talk”, “Chatty Latte”, and “Coffee Time”, which often include content in which the girlboss wants to talk about intimate and personal topics such as friends, guy friends, and body image (see, e.g., Figure 6).

Figure 6

Virtual “chatty lattes”, or other engaging discussions between girlbosses and their followers, are also opportunities for being with others outside of home and work. While digitalisation and social media have changed the understandings of home and work, people's need to be involved with each other remains. For many, one of the main attractions of going to a café, or drinking coffee online, for example, is to be with others and feel less isolated. This is particularly important for those who work from home or live alone (Bookman, 2014). Moreover, the self-regulatory and self-monitoring imagination that social media enhances is used in re-creating feelings and situations that, through their relatability, foster attachments to homogenous girlfriend experiences (Kanai, 2017), or, as Interviewee 3 explained when I asked her what girlboss meant to her:

I think the coolest thing [about] being a woman in business is the connection you have to other women in business […] I have my business besties […] it's more about collaboration than maybe in the more traditional male business world, where it is about competition, at least in my mind.

Consequently, while girlbosses believe showing the real person behind the content is a way to stand out and succeed, it is also a way to search for meaning through what one is doing and to connect with others. According to the empirical data and interviewees, sharing content that sparks conversation and communication is one of the most important parts of being a girlboss. For some, belonging to a group of online friends who send nice comments and help each other to create content can even be the primary reason for participating on YouTube. It makes one feel like they’re “doing something important”; otherwise, without reciprocity, it would seem as if “no one cares” about making videos (Interviewee 1).

Of course, what makes the presentation of the “authentic self” cruel is the paradox it creates: To belong on social media as an authentic person requires authenticity that is judged not by the self, but by others. According to my data, sharing the authentic self can become irrelevant if the audience doesn’t respond to or dislikes the content the girlboss shares; in such a case, sharing no longer makes sense.