In sections of the internet populated by under-30s, one piece of advice has become common: romanticise your life. Take the good things you have and view them more positively – while also, at the same time, making changes to your living situation that will get you closer to the life of your dreams.
On Instagram, you will find millions of posts from (mostly) young women saying how all their problems were solved by following this guidance. On TikTok, videos on the subject have more than 1.4bn views. In these clips, though, you won’t find advice on how to live a life that is exciting and fulfilling, or punctuated by surprise, newness and glamour. Instead, you will find millions of young people describing an ideal life that is overwhelmingly dull, fundamentally rooted in living each day the same, and following a narrow, regimented routine.
This mundane view of a perfect life elevates tedious activities to the status of aspirational living. Your best life will be accessed by taking “pretty pictures”, wearing matching pyjama sets, cooking dinner at home, working out at 5am, buying flowers, lighting candles, stretching. By most measures, these activities are plainly boring, but videos of bedtime routines, trips to coffee shops (often Starbucks), or even just lists of “ways to romanticise your life” have become suffocatingly ubiquitous. Many have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Some influencers will even post multiple videos of the same routine in the space of a few weeks knowing it guarantees engagement (one particularly popular TikTok, which advises viewers to read in the morning and burn sage, currently has over 1m views).
This pervasive inclination towards dullness is also reflected in young people’s taste in celebrities. The monochromatic, beige aesthetics of influencers such as Molly-Mae Hague and Matilda Djerf have earned them millions of young fans (Hague owns a famously beige home and is known for her bland, fast-fashion wardrobe; Djerf founded a multimillion-pound clothing brand selling luxury basics), but they are popular precisely because they embody a way of life that is not merely about aesthetics.
Hague, Djerf and similar celebrities promote a brand of balanced living that involves punishingly healthy routines featuring the occasional glass of white wine, renovating and decorating neutral-toned homes, committing to long-term monogamous relationships, buying expensive fluffy animals and opting for nights in over nights out. Many of these celebrities openly marvel at the fact that they have become so famous despite their lives being so boring.
There are obvious external factors that play into why some young people have become enamoured of these unremarkable routines. In these tightly structured lifestyles, they may glimpse a form of security that can otherwise feel absent in a period marked by economic and political turmoil. The noise of social media may also make quieter lives seem more appealing.
When a video went viral on Twitter earlier this month showing a 28-year-old man’s typical workday – featuring a trip to the office, then the gym, then home to heat a ready meal and playtime with his dog, posted with the caption “This video was so depressing that I started tearing up watching it” – people were quick to criticise the poster’s sentiment. A home, a steady 9-5 with a salary and flexibility, a gym membership and a pet: who wouldn’t want these things, when so much of life is defined by chaos?
When the world feels tumultuous, people reach for what seems like control. But I’m not sure that the appeal of these insipid beige-fluencers can be entirely explained by a yearning for stability. There’s a quiet conservatism in the valorisation of their routines and a sanctimonious tone adopted by those who follow them. This fits with a less reported narrative emerging about Gen-Z: despite their reputation for social liberalism, many young people champion a more puritanical approach to things such as sex, dating, and drinking.
Heteronormative, conventional lifestyles have long been regarded as more socially acceptable than straying from this path, but conventionality has now been granted a pious, aspirational element, as if this isn’t how people have been encouraged to live for centuries. All of this feeds into pre-existing fear and caution around trying anything new: leading a boring, low-risk life is easier than going out in the world and trying to lead an exciting one; and it only becomes more appealing when that safe life is treated as morally superior.
It all feeds our increasingly limited monoculture, in which everything and everyone begins to look the same. Of course, these aesthetics and lifestyles are also incredibly profitable for the people and companies who peddle them (both Hague and Djerf have built lucrative careers from monetising the lives they portray on their Instagram feeds). Some influencers use this appeal to sell fake tan and linen trousers; others get their followers to spend thousands on “romanticise your life” wellness retreats. We are told we’re being given the tools for empowerment by people who really just want to sell us cream-coloured office wear and sweatpants.
This banal, lobotomised vision of life contains a false promise: that if we subscribe to its version of monotony, this will somehow bring us deep satisfaction. But the idea of what our world could be should only be expanding – not being whittled down to fit the narrow messaging of mass culture. Even if it does feature morning workouts and early bedtimes, life shouldn’t be so rigid and boring. It should be diverse and fulfilling; it should be fun. We should be wary of those trying to convince us that anything less is the best the world has to offer.
Sarah Manavis is a US writer covering technology, culture, and society