why everyone's so obsessed with emily mariko

Over the last week and a half I’ve been puzzling over the question: What is it about Emily Mariko?

Emily Mariko, if you’re not familiar, is the Tiktok influencer who hit massive viral success a couple weeks ago with a video of herself making a salmon rice bowl. It’s a very simple recipe: she smashes leftover cooked salmon with a fork, tops it with white rice and microwaves it with an ice cube, then mixes in kewpie mayo, sriracha and soy sauce and eats it with seaweed paper. It’s astoundingly simple, and currently has something like 50 million views. Her account went from 70,000 followers to 4.7 million. Her other cooking videos feature similarly simple, easy recipes: sheet pan salmon and broccoli. Toast with cream cheese and tomatoes. Avocado toast. Salads.

She also makes cleaning videos, which I find even more mesmerizing than her cooking videos. This simple video of her doing laundry, deep cleaning her kitchen, and vacuuming is just, like… incredibly soothing? (I watched it three times and then felt inspired to clean my own kitchen, which I should probably be doing way more often with the amount I cook.) Her other videos include farmers market hauls, meal prep, and fridge cleanouts.

She started a Substack newsletter called Emily Mariko’s Life Plan for the Week, where she shares her meal plan, grocery list, and outfits for the week (written in a Hobonichi Techo planner, also my fave!).

For a while, I wondered why people were obsessed with her. All her videos are about pretty mundane household tasks; the meals she cooks and the chores she does are all pretty simple. She cleans, she cooks? We all do that stuff! Having a command of basic adult responsibilities is not that unusual. Nothing revolutionary here!

But I, too, have become obsessed with her videos. It sort of clicked for me when I found myself scrolling through old videos on her account, and I realized that I never got bored watching her making slow cooker barbacoa burrito bowls or vacuuming under her couch cushions.

I think there’s a few reasons why her videos are so compelling. One is that they’re just so soothing: there’s no music and no talking, just the calming sounds of the vegetables she’s chopping or the water running.

There’s the fact that everything in her home and kitchen is so organized, neat, and clean; her kitchen counter and stovetop are completely spotless. There’s never a drop spilled, never an item out of place on the counter, never any clutter in sight. (Where do all the vegetable scraps and produce bags and dirty dishes go??)

And of course, the food she cooks is appealingly fresh and healthy. Importantly, her recipes offer up a different version of healthy than we typically see from wellness influencers. She shops at the farmers market and eats lots of fresh vegetables, but she also has real balance; we see her eat toast, cream cheese, white rice, mayo.

Her apartment is perfectly clean, she cooks delicious healthy meals, she works out. She seems completely pulled together, and her audience of teens and early twentysomethings idolizes her for that. Her videos evoke a wholesome, aspirational vision of domesticity; in the comments under any of her videos, young women talk about how Emily is so “good at life,” how they wish they could have their shit together like her, clean their apartment, or cook healthy meals. For people who are still trying to figure out “adulting,” it probably does seem revolutionary to have your domestic life all figured out.

Of course, Emily Mariko is a professional influencer, so it’s also worth remembering her job is to create and sell her brand, the idea of who she is. We don’t see the other hours of her day or what her apartment looks like beyond what we see from her phone. She could be messy, eat fast food, or let the dishes pile up for days, and we’d never know; we don’t see anything that doesn’t fit the wholesome brand she’s cultivated. As always, we have to remind ourselves that what we see on social media is very different than reality; she may present an image of being perfectly pulled-together, but we only see the tiny slice of her life that she meticulously edits and posts to Tiktok. Nobody’s perfect.

Good things to read

Is going to the office a broken way of working? The New Yorker.

Why is every young person in America watching The Sopranos? New York Times Magazine.

Identity fraud, Gawker.

The nasty logistics of returning your too-small pants, The Atlantic.

The myth of Asian American identity, New York Times Magazine.

On the internet, we’re always famous, The New Yorker.

Chat history, Real Life Mag.

Why Tiktok is so obsessed with labelling everything a trauma response, Slate.

Who is the Bad Art Friend? New York Times.

Why I keep listening to Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” New York Times.

Good things to cook

Last week I made these crunchy roll bowls and cauliflower fried rice.

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