A Life Lesson from the Kardashians (Even if You Can’t Stand the Kardashians)
It is, as many cultural commentators have remarked, the end of an era. On Tuesday evening, Kim Kardashian West announced to her 188.6 million Instagram followers that after 14 years, the forthcoming 20th season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians will be its last. The time has come for goodbye.
The clan can teach us all a lot about timing. They’ve spent much of the past two decades cannily cashing in on the evolving face of celebrity in a fickle digital age, in real time, despite a self-professed lack of talent — that is, in the traditional sense of “entertainment.” The Kardashian-Jenners don’t sing, dance, or act. Their talents lie elsewhere: in a knack for seizing opportunity at just the right moment, for arriving at the next big thing neither too early nor too late, whether that be paid-access content or social media branding. Kardashian West wasn’t an early adopter of Instagram, for instance, but recognized, once she joined, that she could leverage its already sizable user base to be “my marketing tool and my free focus group.”
