Meeting new people in Cape Town often feels like collecting characters. Talking to friends who know the ins and outs of student life here, it seems like we’re all playing rehearsed roles — and in 2025, the script is written online. Every post, story, follow, and share becomes a cue, a task to hit your mark. This city, where we set our scene, thrives on the buzz of trendsetters and followers alike. By the end of this tale of fate versus façade, I hope these scenes strike a chord, sparking a moment of reflection and questioning the performance. After all, social media is the stage. Shakespeare phrased it best in his play As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women are merely players.”
Scene One: Backstory of The Clouded Mirror.
From where I stand, those who play the game well make a point to publicise it. When we go looking for a guide to the city, we follow digital trails and creators to find out “what’s on in Cape Town”. But in the thick of the (online) cloud, our compass no longer feels like our own. With each new app downloaded, our digital maps suggest something deeper is unfolding, just beyond the surface and far beyond our screens. If we looked it up, we’d find that in 2025, we’re living through the Age of Influence.
In this age, our feeds are flooded with influencer partnerships, event promotions, and curated glimpses into lifestyles that only content creators can afford. Today, clout and curated content determine a baseline for our worth. We follow content creators across platforms based on how satisfied we feel watching them live their lives, and this ‘Great Following’, as I’d like to call it, seeps into how we spend our days. But it’s not just influencers, now it’s our friends’ festival stories, term recap posts, and BeReal soft launches that incentivise FOMO-centred decision-making. Influence is the new currency—and we’re all paying attention.
Scene Two: BeReal, Be Watched.
But how exactly does this performance play out in our day-to-day lives? Let’s start with the most unfiltered stage of them all: BeReal. Marketed as anti-Instagram, it encouraged us to share unfiltered snippets of everyday life, allowing you to document student life ‘realistically’. Instagram, launched in 2010, still holds a tight grip on the 18–25 demographic. For years, people I know have been on and off the app, claiming they benefit from the occasional life update from old friends and the chance to add new faces to their ever-growing network. Gen Z sees Instagram as a stage for curated highlights, so it makes sense that BeReal offered relief — a backstage pass, of sorts. No prep, no poses—just a spontaneous glimpse into our mundane routines. But even BeReal, in finding its place in our lives, has shifted the way we perform and the spaces we choose to simply exist in.
For me, downloading it seemed an innocent choice and a fun way to stay connected to my closest friends. But after a year, I stopped being real. The novelty faded, and the pattern set in. Most days, I’d post the same tired photo: me studying in my room. Or perhaps I knew I was going out at some point in the day, so I purposely left my house with my cell phone data on in case of a fun BeReal. Then came the cycle: open the app; tap the notification; see who was where, with whom, doing what. It always ended the same: I felt a little… off. It’s strange seeing your friends out somewhere you weren’t invited to—even when you were free. Stranger still is the pressure to react or comment, as if digital acknowledgment is proof of friendship. I started believing that being a good friend meant showing up online to acknowledge their activities that day. But the constant reminder that every day is worth being documented and shared became too claustrophobic. It wasn’t enough to share my life; I had to keep track of everyone else’s as well.
Can you guess what unsettled me most? The illusion of closeness. I felt ‘caught up’ in people’s lives, even though we hadn’t spent time together in weeks. Disregarding long-distance relationships for a moment and focusing solely on local connections, this effect makes the irony clear: an app meant to keep us connected can end up highlighting how disconnected we are. Take BeReal’s newest feature, for example — it rewards users who post “on time” with extra BeReals, encouraging us to open the app multiple times a day. Let’s be honest: the app that once promised raw honesty has quietly become just another stage. In actuality, we’ve traded one counterfeit portrayal of life for another. We tell ourselves it’s not toxic, even as we keep our phones within reach every hour, just in case it’s time to be “candid”. It still dictates how often we check in, where we look, and how we present. We still pose—because the reality is, we’re always aware of the audience.
Scene Three: Race Towards More.
That same audience follows us through the streets of Cape Town—this time, on foot—with Strava. Just like BeReal transforms how you document every day, Strava redefines how wellness is performed. The apps may differ, but the effect is the same. On the surface, it’s just a fitness tracker, but in Cape Town, where wellness is aestheticised, and endurance is a badge of honour, Strava is the receipt of buying into the running world. Every recorded run, route, and personal best becomes another line in the script of who you are trying to be, and who the rest of the world needs to see. Without Strava, it seems marathon running would have no proof of entry… I mean, what kind of a health app has a feed where you can like other people’s runs, cycles, or walks? What is healthy about seeing and judging other people’s times? Or about posting your results, hoping to impress a pair of eyes behind the screen? The shift is subtle but significant: moving your body isn’t just for health or joy—it’s for validation. And in a city where hiking Lion’s Head at sunrise is practically a rite of passage, fitness culture walks a fine line between aspiration and exclusivity.
The fitness world in Cape Town has an unmistakable culture around it. You could touch on the exclusivity of Pilates here, too, but given that I am a runner myself, I’ll stick to what I know. Capitalism promotes the chase for the latest watch, the springiest shoes, the sleekest two-piece or kit you’ve ever bought, and underneath it all: the implicit duty to flex every purchase as a life upgrade. The amount of money spent on exercise and movement is astounding, especially when you stand on the sidelines of the Two Oceans Half Marathon and the elitism stops you in your tracks. The gear alone makes the so-called ‘community’ feel out of reach for many middle- and low-income people. Participating in an event like that takes more than effort and training—it takes access, which often means money. As for the tight-knit loop between fitness influencers and Strava, it’s hard to say where the blame lies. They feed off one another. But Strava deserves credit for turning Cape Town’s running scene into something that students don’t just join—they feel compelled to perform in.
Scene Four: The Professional Play and Selling the Dream.
From kilometres logged to credentials listed, the metrics of performance shift once again as we step into the working world.
Downloading apps for social and fitness purposes is not where our journey ends. Instead, LinkedIn fills a gap in the market by encouraging a polished, marketable version of your life story. It asks you to perform more than just professionalism, but also a sense of purposefulness. It’s not just who you are—it’s who you claim you’ll be next. I recently downloaded LinkedIn, mostly encouraged by my mentors and peers. I wanted to explore my options and connect with people in the science space I studied in. But now, as I near the end of my undergraduate degree, I’m starting to realise how digital evidence of a “successful” life will follow us indefinitely. It’s hard not to feel disheartened watching people land roles or internships you’re just as qualified for. I can also see how aspiration and ambition are applauded, where bold visions of the future and polished pride in past achievements earn the most attention. And because it’s an app built around networks, who you went to (private) school with or who you happen to know carries real weight. What does that mean for those without the same resources or origin stories to fall back on? For the students who have opportunities to share, these features make entering the working world feel increasingly high-stakes. I am getting the impression that our next assignment is to market ourselves correctly. And what if we don’t know what that might be—or rather, who we want to audition for?
I also think it’s worth noting that influencer culture has taken on a job of its own, especially in Cape Town. I know a few people who have entered into content creator status, promoting brands and receiving PR packages for Instagram Reels. This alone implies that the landscape of careers for young adults has shifted. I mean, Cape Town especially has seen influencers touch down on its soil a couple of times. The beginning of this year and the end of last year saw a random surge of well-known content creators like Ayamé, Olly Bowman, Sharky, and Seb Melrose. Boosting tourism or not, why is Cape Town seeing so many touchdowns for promotional content? I also find it interesting that this year the city hosted a Digital Nomad Week, promoting those with careers on the go, and encouraging connection around the buzz of building your brand. It is clear to me that a future of planting roots in this city is analogous to staying online and hence, onstage. Is Cape Town being branded, and if so, what does that mean for the students trying to live, not perform, here?
Final Act: Final Call.
For our generation, the emphasis on technological burdens is something we’ve grown up with, and it appears we have to age with it. But it is up to us to know when to draw the curtain closed and choose to live privately, for ourselves.
In the face of sign-ups and subscriptions, reflect on whether your online personas are upstaging your actual identity. Being a student could take on a sense of childlike wonder if it were experienced in the present, sans posting. If today could be tasted, seen, and felt, what would it be like sans comments, sans likes, and sans shares? Maybe the most radical thing we can do in the Age of Influence is to live a day that leaves no digital trace. Will you choose to step off stage?