Urmumsyadad On The Isolation That Comes With 130K Insta Followers

@urmumsyadad is the Instagram star who cracked a hundred k by being funny and looking fly.

When Kai Suteja started posting homemade movies and shorts that were as aesthetically-pleasing as they were funny to the ‘gram back in 2016, people couldn’t help but like, comment and subscribe.

Suteja strikes a unique balance between taking the piss out of fashion, all the while loving himself sick in I Am Gia. He’ll joke about veganism, but you’d better believe he’s practicing it. He’ll talk candidly about intrusive thoughts, a mental health issue he genuinely suffers from, and somehow make it relatable, and dare we say, funny.

With a combined following of over 350K across Insta and FB, the 23-year-old funnyman is a veritable force in the Australian content creation scene.

While he has a legions of fans who love his schtick, he has mixed feelings about the platform that brought him fame and a way to make a small fortune through brand endorsements.

PEDESTRIAN.TV interviewed Suteja for the third episode of No Chill, the mental health podcast that chats to your URL favourites about what’s going on IRL:

When we spoke to him, it was clear he feels dissonance between who he really is versus who he is on Instagram.

“So everyone has a public perception of who you are. Obviously @urmumsyadad is a persona that I play… but I don’t think people understand that it’s a character. It’s like, unless you wear a fucking wig, and totally change who you are on screen, people generally just think it’s you being you. But it’s totally a persona, or a heightened exaggeration of who I am,” he says.

“The weirdness about it [@urmumsyadad] is totally me, but unless I’m super comfortable with someone, I’m totally introverted. I will never be myself when I just meet someone for the first time. If I go out to a place, I’m like, this is anxiety times a thousand, I don’t want to talk to these people.”

While he admits that becoming an online sensation has it’s perks (free green smoothies from About Life, anyone?), the pursuit of likes can push you away from your true goals.

“I started getting trendy on [Instagram], and then I was like, I don’t want to be a dude that like, sticks teeth whitening shit in his mouth and then smiles at the camera for a paycheque.

As a way to channel his energy into something more concrete, Suteja has begun hosting doofs in Bali. His first, Gypsylands, went down in late July and he cites it as a major success, chiefly because “nobody died”:

His next one is going down this Halloween, and it’s aptly named Spookylands. You can buy ticcies here.

To stay updated on the latest episodes of No Chill, you can follow us on Twitter or subscribe on iTunes.

And as always – don’t keep calm, but do carry on.

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