Roar writers Rachel Brooker and Sam Light about the concept they call “class tourism”.
London living means a lot of sneering from people who see us, students, as living in a bubble. And perhaps some of us are. Youtube has been flooded with videos challenging the influencers in question to temporarily live off small amounts of money. Being ‘broke’ seems to be increasingly fashionable at the moment, and these articles and vlogs provide a perfect example of how trying to escape your bubble can be done badly. You would think challenges like ‘living on £1 a day for a week’ would help give insight into the lives of less privileged Londoners. However, by using such challenges as entertainment you end up being misleading and insensitive.
Viral trends are not what we should be using to gain awareness of the poverty people live in throughout the UK. You can open any newspaper and read about student nurses who rely on food banks in order to survive the living expenses of their degree.
To make a challenge like this realistic in the first-place, budgeting would need to involve much more than just food. For one, using a £50 Nutribullet or your girlfriends Waitrose card, like one influencer we encountered did, shows an embarrassing lack of self-awareness about your own position in society. Extreme budgeting involves balancing transport costs with heating, clothing and rent, as well as finding your next meal. The narrow presentation of poverty in these videos’ borders on deception. Vlogs which end back in a £200 a week zone 1 apartment do not begin to honestly show the despair and shame involved in actually living on only £1 a day.
The real insincerity of these videos is portrayed at the end of the week when the Youtubers get to return to their everyday lives, not having to worry about whether they have enough money to keep the lights and radiator on. Poverty is not a spectacle to participate in on your own terms. Budgeting is more than finding freebies at Pret and Krispy Kreme. It consumes every aspect of your life, leaving you nothing to look forward to at the end of the week, the month or the year.
If people really want to see the cold and harsh reality of having to budget to survive, they should be volunteering at food banks and working with charities such as Living below the line. Creating voyeuristic pieces of performance poverty to profit from sponsors and advertisements helps no one other than yourself.
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