In recent years, Emiratis, especially women, have taken up personal development training as a vital resource in their projects of self-improvement. This trend coincides with the state’s active dissemination of personal development as a strategy to orient its citizens and expatriate residents toward new forms of neoliberal citizenship. Through the idiom of self-improvement, these new discourses of citizenship place the onus of personal achievement on the individual, and, in so doing, acquit the state of any structural responsibility it has toward its subjects (Al Korani 2020, Brown 2019). Emirati social media lifestyle influencers have stood out as exemplars of these new citizen subjectivities. By embarking on monetized opportunities over social media, they are able to branch out into the country’s expanding neoliberal economy while using their platforms as spaces of aspiration and self-actualization (Senft 2008, 2013). Yet, as state sponsored agents of change, lifestyle social media influencers depart quite significantly from political influencers, such as those who used social media during the Arab Spring to help mobilize the “Arab Street” as a space of political dissent (Bayet 2003, 2015). Accordingly, I conceptualize social media in the United Arab Emirates as both a space of governance and governmentality, where discourses of self-actualization and social contestation intersect (Foucault 1982). In turn, I frame social media lifestyle influencers as “celebrities of the quotidian,” who exhibit their lives as didactic representations of the successes and challenges that working professionals and novel young nuclear families experience. I ask: Within their cultivated niche of aspiration and personal development, to what extent can the ostensibly apolitical Emirati lifestyle influencers be political? To explore this question, I examine how a group of Emirati lifestyle influencers use English and bilingual Arabic-English social media platforms to further reinforce and circulate discourses of self-actualization. At the same time, I show how their strategic use of English on their platforms fosters a space of indirect contestation, where they can negotiate different epistemologies of the self, question traditional and state ideologies, and raise pertinent social issues through intersubjective experiences with their network of Arab, Emirati, and international followers.