Proximity Without the Inconvenience

YouTube is mostly unwatchable. Prank channels, algorithmic outrage, gaming commentary by people who have never once considered that silence is also an option. You open it for a specific video and twenty minutes later you’ve watched four consecutive things you didn’t want to watch. The logic of the platform is against you.

Except for vlogs. I’ve spent more time watching vlogs than I’d like to admit—strangers going about their days, cooking things, traveling places, talking to nobody in particular from the passenger seat of a car. There’s something in the format that feels closer to following someone on the street than watching a film, and I mean that as a compliment. No narrative, no resolution. Just the texture of someone else’s existence, briefly.

Rose Bertram makes vlogs now, and they are exactly what you’d expect from someone who looks the way she does and has access to the life she has. Belgian model, Sports Illustrated regular, comfortable on camera in a way that doesn’t read as performance—she just exists at a frequency slightly above the ordinary and the vlogs document that fact. Watching them produces a very specific feeling: the warmth of proximity to a person without any of the actual complications of proximity to a person. You get six minutes of Rose Bertram’s very good life, and then you close the tab. Perfect is probably the word for her. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.