The 'Aesthetic' Epidemic: Have People Lost their Authenticity?
We’re all familiar with the term ‘romanticising your life’. It’s a practice many people have adopted in recent years as a way of making life more enjoyable, especially with its popularisation on social media. A large part of this is choosing an aesthetic to follow, a style and way of living that follows certain rules and ideals. A lot of people argue that adopting an aesthetic is an enjoyable, uplifting thing to do, while others are beginning to question whether it is in fact restricting and perhaps even hindering a person’s capacity for growth. Nowadays aesthetics have become a way to categorise lifestyles and fit them into neat little packages. They’ve become products that can be sold to people.
All it takes is a simple search on TikTok or Pinterest and you’ll find a multitude of different aesthetics that you could try. Creators post guides on how you can dress, what you can buy, music you can listen to, hobbies you can pick up to immerse yourself more in the aesthetic and conform to the ideals it is built upon. Some people find these tips helpful and inspiring in their journey to create their dream life. They feel having a group of people online who are interested in the same aesthetic provides a sense of community which is comforting and supportive.
On the other hand, some people worry that we are becoming too obsessed with aesthetics; that people are putting themselves in a box and limiting themselves. Some are concerned that people are committing wholeheartedly to an aesthetic and a persona which doesn’t fully align with their true desires. An article on Glamour reported that Gia, a former high school senior from Chicago, once got over 2.1 million views on a video she posted voicing her concerns about Gen Z’s obsession with aesthetics. She said, “People take it to such a drastic extent that it’s as if they almost fetishise themselves as this character to the point where they start subconsciously moulding themselves as this persona, even if it clashes with what they really want."
This especially starts becoming a more controversial issue when you take certain aesthetics such as the ‘trad-wife aesthetic ’, which ‘idealises a patriarchal society ’, and other aesthetics which could raise moral and ethical questions and have the potential to be harmful, especially if a person is confining themselves to this one perspective and immersing themselves solely in that type of content. Gia argues that: “This echo chamber fosters comfort, and you cannot grow in comfort […] to create your own identity that’s authentic to you and feels right to you, you have to break out of people that are just mirrors and reflections of you. You have to understand different perspectives and broaden your horizons." It’s better to explore different aesthetic’s ideas and take a bit from each to build your own life filled with a mix of things that you enjoy, rather than being in a group who are all replicas of each other.
Personally, I believe that there’s nothing wrong with liking a certain aesthetic and deciding you want to live a life like that, as long as it is actually something you can envision yourself being happy in and you’re not just pretending to like it because someone you have seen on TikTok looks like they’re living a perfect life. I also think it’s important not to become unhealthily obsessed or hyper-fixated on trying to conform to every single aspect that matches a particular aesthetic. You don’t have to like everything social media says you should like, and you’re not a fake or a fraud if you like the clean girl aesthetic but you don’t have a twenty-step skin care routine.
It makes much more sense to think of these aesthetics as tools that you can use for inspiration and to take bits from all different aesthetics to build a life that truly feels authentic to you. Also exploring different styles and points of view is very beneficial for learning and growing rather than confining and restricting yourself to one way of thinking. We have to treat aesthetics as things that describe what we like. They should not define what we are before we have the chance to figure that out for ourselves, and they shouldn’t put unnecessary pressure on us to consistently present ourselves in a certain way every single day.
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