Maybe Don’t Romanticize Your Life

I saw the first video during the itchiest part of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We had already watched Tiger King, and we no longer felt compelled to wipe down our Doritos. The existential terror of the initial wave dulled somewhat, but the jitters of cabin fever had not. We wore masks to the grocery store and worked from home and listened obsessively to the news even though it turned our stomachs into tight, acid knots.

My now-husband and I had moved into a 1970s townhome with a musty smell no amount of cleaning could erase. In hindsight, it was likely decades of smokers covered up with a few hearty coats of Landlord Beige™️.  My then-boss waded deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories every day, and did her best to pull her precariously-employed employees in after her.

The Cool Waters of Picture-Perfect Mundanity

One night, as I once more grasped for a shred of dopamine online, I saw the first video of the “romanticize your life” ilk. I can’t remember the exact subject. Likely, the video showed an iced coffee. First, an unseen hand pours coffee over spherical cubes nestled gently into a clear glass mug with a small pair of tongs. Then, like Carly Simon’s wet dream, a cloud of milk blooms in the coffee, and given a smart stir with a gold, twirly bar spoon. All of this is done on a smooth stone countertop with a bright beam of afternoon sun slicing across it.

It was so…nice. Suddenly the day to day mundanity which we were all so closely tied to had been transformed into an object of beauty. I began to see more and more of these videos. People going for a walk in the park, scoring a loaf of bread, showing off a knitting project, making silly jokes about the strangely universal private conversations we have with loved ones and ourselves. The Internet I saw, which had previously been the purview of celebrities, wealthy influencers, and elaborate artisans began adopting the language of the everyday. 

Paying Attention

I’ve always loved the quote, “Happiness lies in sanity. Sanity lies in paying attention.” by Julia Cameron. I thought these videos trafficked in the kind of paying attention Cameron recommends - watching trees bud on a cold spring day, reveling in a child’s laughter floating out the window, savoring a cup of tea at the perfect temperature. In other words, the mundanities of life which, when paid proper attention, accumulate into large piles of beauty which put the large piles of worry into perspective.

These videos seemed like a controllable way to grow the pile during an especially uncontrollable time. As we felt the weight of geopolitics and capitalism and feeling bad wrapped around our necks like so many albatrosses, the siren call sang out, “romanticize your life.” Maybe we couldn’t get our representatives to stop saying unhinged things, maybe we couldn’t stop the anger and frustration radiating around us, maybe we couldn’t keep our loved ones from getting sick or dying, but we could at least take a deep breath and try to enjoy making sourdough bread.

And so, I tried. As it turns out, romanticizing your life for an online audience unequivocally sucks.

Enter the Manicure

Something which I was not sophisticated enough to realize at first became very clear, very quickly when I tried to romanticize my life for an audience. Each time I tried to pour tea in the sun, I noticed how hard it was to get the lighting just right, and to cut out the less posh parts of my apartment. When I put together a cozy movie night, I spent hours editing in CapCut - more time spent on editing than watching the movie. Doing anything with my hands, I realized, seemed to require either long, delicate fingers (which I do not have) or a perfectly done manicure.

Much of the aesthetics I saw were either not achievable, or required additional resources if I wanted to play the game right. The funds started small; a manicure here, a pretty new plant there. But I started to realize a trend with the content that performed the best: it was all loaded with, to put it bluntly, stuff. Knickknacks and string lights and flower petals and layers upon layers upon layers of stuff. I’m far from a minimalist, but my content all seemed to look sickly and thin in comparison.

(Ro)monetizing Your Life

Still, I kept trying. For three and a half years, I tried. Every time I became discouraged that my aesthetic wasn’t pretty or clean or high-quality or trendy enough, I got discouraged and would stop for a little while. Then, a cute little graphic telling me to go on a “hot girl walk” so I could “romanticize my life” would suck me back in. I felt guilty for my apparent lack of appreciation for my own life, guilty for the fact that the aesthetic video I took of roses dancing in the breeze didn’t take off. It seems so clear to me now now, but at the time I couldn’t envision a version of romanticizing my life that didn’t involve documenting it on social media to prove my mundane romantic mettle.

Meanwhile, in parallel, companies began to catch on to this. Sure, influencers had existed for years by 2020, but even still photography with models now co-opts the aesthetics of the “romanticize your life” movement. Romanticize your vacuum. Romanticize your fitness app. Romanticize your weed gummies. Advertisers still sell us on a better version of our life, they just soften it, tantalizing us into seeing how much cleaner our homes, fitter our bodies, or healthier our minds could be with their simple products.

I can’t begrudge those who make their livings by perfecting this romanticism. We all live in a late-capitalist society; we all do our best every day to get by. Additionally, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a very good visual artist, or photographer, or model, or graphic designer, or videographer, or video editor. More power to the people who make their living that way! Several of them are my good friends! But in its pernicious way, social media tells us that if we aren’t one of those things (or several put together) we aren’t doing life well enough. Not just our job, not just our creativity, our life.

Reclaiming Sanity

The “sanity” to which Cameron refers has nothing to do with perfectly painted nails or the new miracle CBD product or a very expensive camera and proficiency with Adobe Premiere Pro. In fact, it necessitates a certain practical acceptance of your present circumstances. Cameron had her revelation about paying attention when she read her grandmother’s letters detailing the goings on in her garden. Cameron knew that her grandmother was being nearly torn apart (literally and figuratively) by a volatile, abusive husband, and yet her letters indicated a certain understated implacability. The garden provided her with an important method of mental survival.

While Cameron’s grandmother might not have stayed with her husband in the modern era, plenty of us have terrible circumstances which we cannot change (at least immediately). Chronic illness, poverty, an aging parent, or a job in an hair-raisingly remote location, can all come for any one of us at any time. Leaning into the beauty around you, the things you can control and appreciate, can give us a tether back to ourselves.

Not everyone is an artist or graphic designer or exceptional videographer, and that’s really okay. It’s even (gasp) okay to be creative and be bad at those things. I’m almost embarrassed to admit how long I was held under the spell that I must perfectly arrange, film, share, and optimize my morning matcha. I’ve done a lot of work on my relationship to creativity and performance, and yet I couldn’t see the way I was torturing myself. Surely I will torture myself with something else soon, but I dearly hope to avoid the trap of feeling I must perfectly document it in order for it to be “real.”

It’s okay to romanticize your life. Just know, you don’t have to perfectly document it on an aesthetic social media profile to prove it all to us.