The Kardashians have changed your life and you can’t deny it

Love ‘em, hate ‘em, or you don’t give a hoot about them, it doesn’t matter because they know how to play the crowd.

The Kardashian-Jenner clan have infiltrated our lives in more ways than we can count on our fingers, and there’s no escaping. Here are just a few examples:

Reality TV wouldn’t exist without their successful model

Otherwise known as ‘trash tv’, but who cares? We can’t always be expected to watch Louis Theroux documentaries, plus it’s interesting living vicariously through the Kardashians while you’re living on £5.30 an hour.

Their show ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’ began in 2007 and its success became a springboard for the reality TV phenomena: Made in Chelsea (2011), the real trash show ‘The Only Way is Essex’ one year earlier, Geordie Shore – you get the picture.

Complain all you want but their show is still going after 10 years – they must be doing something right (or wrong) if we’re still watching them, right?

The selfies that will one day be displayed in The National Gallery 

Stories will lead with Kardashian/Jenner selfies (or in Kim’s case, a book conveniently named “Selfish”) and they’re always trending- I don’t know if that’s saying something about the reader or the paper. Maybe I’m being hypocritical by talking about them, I’m acknowledging this so you don’t have to in the comments section.

500-word articles will tell us what’s happening in the picture like we can’t see for ourselves, and I find it very condescending – Kylie’s left boob is slightly bigger, is she having surgery one breast at a time so we don’t notice? I’m glad that an English graduate is putting their degree to good use and hitting me with these evocative questions.

I hope their abs are working hard

As if watching their lives on TV wasn’t enough, we feel that a commentary is necessary for every picture, tweet or status they drop. A selfie will be the centre of international debate: should she have posted that nude online? What will her kids think of her? She’s a mother for goodness sake, her bum is more reliable than that idiot waiter I hired (reference to that magazine cover).

Everyone wants a say and it goes something like this: keyboard warriors (I would love to do so and so to her), academics (they’re feminist icons), someone else (hating them makes you a misogynist)- sorry what!?

We go to galleries to admire nude muses, Adam and Eve never had their clothes on, and most portraits of the Virgin Mary are on the verge of breastfeeding (and these are the religious ones), so what’s the difference between posing for and posting a nude selfie/photoshoot? Same thing, different medium and reaction.

The ‘it’s no biggie’ surgery effect

They didn’t invent surgery, people were getting things fixed, changed, however you want to put it, way before they came along. But what I would say is that they instigated conversation about it straight after making you feel self-conscious, but that’s more to do with marketing.

I’ve thought about getting things done like my lips because it’s temporary, easy to do and everyone does it nowadays. The Jenn-ashians created the ‘it’s no biggie’ effect regarding surgery. Kylie plumped her lips at sixteen-years-old around the same time I was going to school in tracksuits for GCSE math study sessions.

I hate my nose, no biggie, I’ll get a nose-job with my student loan.

Without Kylie we wouldn’t have realised anything in 2016

Where would we be without Kylie Jenner’s prophecies about 2016 being the year of ‘realising things?’ There’s no denying that we all learnt a thing or two last year: some people definitely shouldn’t have access to power, Brits are more nationalistic than we thought, and Toblerones are only edible in a shape we’re all familiar with.

Now it’s 2017 and a bleaker time sans Miss Jenner’s revelatory predictions: we are barely in the loop about the Brexit situation, but seem to know more about what Theresa May is giving up for Lent (hint: it’s crisps). Admit it, we would all be lost without the oracle of wisdom that is Kylie Jenner.

In a pre-Kardashian era “does my bum look big in this?” wasn’t the question on everybody’s underdrawn lips

Cast your mind back to a pre-Kardashian era. Waist trainers were nonexistent and squats weren’t the most common exercise performed in a gym. Society’s “ideal” body type was drastically different without Khloe Kardashian gracing our TV screens with her curvaceous hourglass bod. Without the Kardashians Botticelli-style Renaissance body ideals would be back- just think of all the carbs you could consume. Clean eating would well and truly be dead.

Before the Kardashians came along the “it” crowd was vastly different: no more Kendall Jenner’s model squad

Before the Kardashians gossip magazines had a different “it” crowd on their radar. The likes of Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton were the names on everybody’s lips, and heroine chic was the prevailing aesthetic.

Never forget how Paris practically made Kim well before her 2007 sex tape, when she hired her as a a stylist, reminding us that there’s hope for us all. If Kim can go from organising Paris Hilton’s closet to being one half of the world’s most talked about couple, then maybe we all have a shot at achieving fame and riches.