The Not-So-Harsh Reality of Eating and Traveling for a Living

Plus, everything the algorithm might not have shown you the past two weeks.

When thinking of what I wanted to tackle in my second newsletter since starting this Substack, I turned to my TikTok comment section. “You’re living the dream,” they say. “Get a real job,” they say. Both are fair assessments, to an extent.

Since I left my job as an editor at People Magazine to do my own food and travel content creation full time, a couple paradoxes have come to the forefront of my life: I feel like I’m always on vacation and never on vacation; I feel like I’m always working and never working.

This is not a “being an influencer is actually a really hard job” post, I promise. I spent all of today ranking Disney World bread baskets and then went to happy hour. My current self wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me. But I would like to perhaps tastefully shed some reality on how it all works.

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First, though, here’s all my content you might have missed from my feeds during the past two weeks due to targeted harassment by the social media algorithms towards me. We’ve got…

• 8 new recipes: Cheesy Baked Lasagna Soup, One-Pot Lemon Chicken and Orzo Soup, Pineapple Fried Rice with Chili-Glazed Coconut Shrimp, My Mom’s Lebanese Beef and Green Beans, Sheet Pan Garlic Bread Grilled Cheeses, One-Skillet King Ranch Chicken Casserole, Salsa Verde Chicken Tacos, and 4-Ingredient Caprese Skillet Pizza. Plus, a round up of 5 easy weeknight pastas!

• 10 new Disney guides: 21 best Disney World bread baskets (ranked), all the chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever eaten at Disney World (ranked), my top 5 loaded fries at Disney World, the best ice cream spots at each Disney World park, my top 5 espresso martinis at Disney World, my top 5 foods at Disney’s Polynesian Resort, the best calamari at Disney World, the top 5 Foods I ate on the Disney Treasure cruise ship, and everything I ate at the Marvel Restaurant at sea. Plus, a run-down of the rides getting rid of virtual queue next week.

• 4 new Key West guides: a tour of the historic and newly-reopened La Concha hotel, the top 5 cheeseburgers in paradise, my favorite frozen drinks on the island, and a biking food tour to five of my favorite restaurants.

• 8 more rando travel guides: my top 5 donuts in America, my top 5 vodka pastas in America, the most beautiful Hooters in the world, an updated tour of Universal Orlando’s Portofino Bay resort, a review of the iconic Mai Kai Polynesian show, everything I ate at Lisa Vanderpump’s new Las Vegas restaurant, a life-changing potato dish I ate in Minneapolis, and my favorite beach bar in Belize.

Now that I see it all in one place…it’s a bit much. But that’s the thing: Unlike at a real “real” job, if you work harder and produce more content, you see monetary benefit! More specifically, the more views you get on TikTok, the more money goes into your bank account on the 15th of each month from the Creator Fund. The more followers and engagement you gain across platforms, the more you can charge for a sponsored post.

Those are just a couple ways this whole operation keeps going—I can get more into the financial logistics of being a content creator in a later post, if y’all are interested—but I don’t love talking about it because I worry that it takes the fun out of it.

The truth is, it is fun. You have to do it for the love of the game, or it won’t work long term. I love dreaming up recipes, filming them, and editing it all together into a package I think y’all will love in return. I love putting together bizarro niche travel guides that might help you on your trip to Disney World, or that you might at least hate watch out of morbid curiosity.

Having said all that, it takes a mental and physical toll like any other job. I haven’t turned the content switch off of my brain for one day in at least five years, not even during my honeymoon (the Buenos Aires content was too fire not to share.) Spending only three days at home over a month and a half at the end of last year had me—as Brittany Cartwright once said—on the brim. Nervous breakdown levels.

But I took this month to (mostly) stay home and regroup, get my anxiety medication in order, and start this Substack, whatever it may grow to become. Because I am living the dream, and I really don’t want to get a real job again.

Final note: I just reached over 3,000 subscribers on here—which I don’t think is a lot in the grand scheme of things—but I appreciate you all for being early adopters to this platform. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. (I just saw Casablanca for the first time two weeks ago, before that I only knew that line from the Great Movie Ride.)