It seems like these days everyone has their own personal brand created through a mixture of style, attitude, likes/favorites, and hobbies. Everyone stays up to date with the latest trends in their own way in order to maintain their aesthetic label. Navigating a personal style, look, or brand is a piece of identity formation and figuring out who you are exactly. A simple search on the internet could lead you down a path of millions of videos, posts, and articles about becoming “that girl” through a specific morning routine or a guide to living a “simple slow cottage core life” or “how to dress like you’re a cool girl from a Pinterest board.” This content can lead people down a rabbit hole of trying to find the aesthetic that fits them the best.
Sometimes though, the social media influencer-esque aesthetics are simply unattainable to the general population of viewers. Waking up at five am, eating meal prepped overnight oats, and having a fifteen step shower routine followed by a six step skin care routine everyday is not the best or easiest routine for everyone.
There are other ways to prioritize you and create a better suited routine, but they might not be as picture perfect as the TikTok videos show, and that’s okay. You can be “that girl” without the bathroom organizational drawers from Amazon and the expensive skin care products that last a week. You just have to find what makes you feel the best and what works for your schedule. Maybe once a month you can enjoy your overnight oats and a relaxing shower routine, but it doesn’t have to be every day.
Similarly, aesthetics can influence people’s life goals too. Maybe someone’s really into the cottagecore aesthetic and dreams of living a life filled with frolicking in flower fields with their best friends and no work commitments, technology, or social media. Again, this is a great dream to have, but unattainable for most people and it especially won’t happen overnight. Maybe start small and work towards creating a small garden or spend a day off of social media.
Something great that can happen when you embrace an unaesethic life is you don’t feel like you have to fit into a certain label. Aesthetics can sometimes be suffocating and can make it difficult to explore new styles when everything you own is the same. If you don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and branch out of your likes and dislikes, then you can dip your toe into many different versions of yourself. Your aesthetic can also flow as you change and grow. You probably won’t like the same types of clothes, music, media or hairstyles your whole life, so you can just prepare for this change.
Having a personal aesthetic can help you meet people who like the same things as you, but it can also be hard to keep up with and keep you in a bubble. Exploration and change are part of finding yourself, and finding yourself is messy. When you are deciding who you are and what you like, you may be constantly changing and deciding on new looks and favorite things. If you do this while embracing an unaesthetic life, then you won’t have to completely change everything about you all the time.