James' World 2

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Kylie Perkins faces the camera in a pink quarter-zip, hands clasped to reveal a blue manicure. “Are you doing your best, or are you lying because it’s easier?” she asks. “If you tell the truth, you are gonna be forced to make changes.”

The 27-year-old TikTok influencer has amassed most of her 2 million followers in a matter of weeks — half of them in just the past few days — by posting motivational videos from her home in North Carolina aimed at young mothers like her who may feel behind on housework, urging them to essentially get their shit together. In some, she demonstrates her morning routine of drawing the curtains, opening the windows, and making the bed. In others, she wipes down her kitchen, folds laundry, or simply addresses the camera. In many of them, she’s yelling.

“You’re capable of so much more than just scrolling on your phone and not getting anything done,” she says. Her aim, she explains, is to help women experience clearer minds through uncluttered spaces.

Women seem to be responding to the tough love. “Kylie Perkins has yelled at me enough that I finally got up and started to do something about my depression,” a 30-year-old Kansas City woman named Heather Richard said in a voice-over for a recent video. In her post, Richard described the challenge, and ultimate relief, of deep-cleaning her home while newly sober.

“pov you introduce your teenage daughter to Kylie Perkins and this is what her room looks like this morning,” reads the text over a video from another woman, who filmed herself entering a tidy bedroom with a neatly made bed and raised blinds.

The conversation around Perkins has quickly become about more than cleaning. When, in recent days, an influencer made a video alluding to Perkins and suggesting she supported Donald Trump, conservatives quickly rallied around Perkins, following her in droves and flooding her comment sections with support. “Following you because of the way the left is trying to cancel you,” one woman wrote.

Perkins’s rapid ascendence seems to mark, if not the start of a new era, a return to an old one: “bootstraps”-style self-help is back. That means no wallowing allowed. In her videos, there’s a relentless focus on the individual as the agent of change, regardless of context. If you feel shame or guilt about your mess, you probably should, she says — that’s a message from your brain to get going and fix it. (Perkins didn’t respond to requests to speak for this story.)

Part of the reason Perkins isn’t compelled by conditions that may make it hard to be productive, like depression or ADHD, she’s suggested, is that she has overcome some difficult personal circumstances of her own. In her videos, she has mentioned parents who suffered from drug addiction, a period as a teen when she experienced homelessness, and later, as a mother, a challenging time when one of her children was having seizures and Perkins struggled with suicidal ideation.

As such, she seems to have little patience for people who point to some sort of circumstantial disadvantage as an explanation for flagging motivation or functioning. If she has come through all that, she suggests in her videos, you can get off the couch and do the dishes. “I have had to be tough my whole entire life,” Perkins says. “That’s why I come on here and I’m tough with you guys.”

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Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: @sociallykylie/TikTok, @heatheratl/TikTok, @thesoberglowwithheather/TikTok

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