A Rainy Sunday Spin Class & All That Glitters Online Is Not Gold

This morning at a cycling class, I ran into a well-known German influencer. It was 9 a.m. on a rainy Sunday. The class was far from fully booked, about a quarter of the bikes were taken. A dozen young women who had dragged themselves out of bed on this cold morning to do something for themselves. Honestly, these are my favorite classes: not much going on, not a lot of commotion around you, and you can focus completely on yourself.

That’s what I love about cycling classes. Yes, it’s a bit of a cliché, a woman in her twenties who wants to tell you how great spinning is... But when I walk into that dark room, put in my earplugs (heard we’re responsible with our hearing now, hahah) and the music is so loud that all you feel is the muffled bass pounding through your body, everything goes quiet in the middle of all that noise, and it’s only about you. Usually I tune out everything around me and don’t notice who’s sitting next to me. More than once I’ve realized after class, slightly embarrassed, that I’d been in the same room as people I know without noticing.

But today, in this small group, I looked into the big mirrored wall in front of me and, without really thinking, let my eyes wander over the front row in the reflection. They caught on a familiar face, and for the rest of the class I couldn’t shake it.

In our teens, my best friend and I followed this influencer, back in the early days when creators with more than 100k subscribers on YouTube were still few and far between. Those were different times, when you’d open YouTube in the afternoon after school and watch the latest uploads from "YouTube Deutschland". Everything felt so down to earth back then, you could relate to these people. I think that was my beginning of parasocial relationships with online people? It def was nothing compared to the sheer amount of content spread across all the different platforms today.

Back then, this creator had already started to shift from beauty content toward more fitness, business and self-optimization. Over time I stopped following her and others, because I hit what we’d now call influencer fatigue pretty early on. But every now and then she’d still pop up in my feed, and I’d get a quick update on what she was up to.

Things seemed to be going really well for her: super athletic, slim, pretty, successful, her own brand, lots of followers. She made it, right? And even today, years later, she’s known all over Germany, big brand deals, even being part of a TV show. She must have an amazing life, I always thought, before swiping the Reel away, because you don’t want to compare yourself to people you don’t actually know, right?

But when I saw her today, I was surprised by how little the person in real life matched the online persona. Instead of a confident, high-energy woman giving it her all, there sat a young woman who looked anything but happy. Small, insecure. Unhappy. She was biting her nails, staring at the floor, and couldn’t really keep up with the workout. And I don’t mean that in a mean way. We all know those days when you drag yourself to the gym, to work, wherever, even though you really don’t want to. Sometimes it gets better and your mood turns around completely, and then you can proudly tell everyone how you didn’t want to get out of bed this morning and now you’re walking out of class full of endorphins. And then there are the days when the mood just stays the same.

She didn’t post an Instagram story about her morning workout that day. I checked, I admit it. Instead, she reposted a picture from an event a while back.

I’m not judging. Who would want to admit that they just weren’t feeling it today? That they were tired, drained? Maybe not feeling 100%? And that getting up early really wasn’t necessary this time?

The rest of us can just keep it to ourselves. Maybe we complain to our best friend and tell them what a crappy day it was. But would you say that in front of hundreds of thousands of people?

Funny enough, I go to these classes to tune everything out and focus on myself. And this time I spent the whole class watching someone else.

And that’s exactly the point: a public person’s life can look as amazing as it wants, but you’ll never see the really low moments. You only see the highlights, and that shapes your entire image of that person. But as in so many areas of life, the same holds true here:

“Non omne quod nitet aurum est.” (All that glitters is not gold.)