It’s All Sweetgreen
My mood really hinges on the weather this time of year. Grey skies and cold-but-humid 60 degree days can create a visceral type of boredom, leaving you frantically checking the weather hoping for some relief, closing and opening the same handful of apps begging for something serendipitous to add a pleasant surprise to your day. Walking around the neighborhood under the muted sunlight, the small shops and things that on a nice day would inspire you to explore start to feel like cardboard cutouts. Things start to lose their novelty when its not 75 and clear. When the flat light of a grey day strips the bon vivant magic away, all that’s left for something to stand on is its substance, and I’ve noticed a lot of things now start to look shaky in that light.
It feels like we’re currently in a weird state of stasis, where Online and IRL start to become indistinguishable, simultaneously trying to simulate each other until nothing is recognizably organic at all. What we’re left with is an excess of empty symbols. Things begin to bleed together. You see the same array of stuff in front of you that you see scrolling through Instagram. Another $16 meal, another $235 piece of clothing, another useless tech product or “deluxe” workout class. Similar homogenized experiences leading to predictable outcomes, none of them that tempting. A large amount of things recently, both IRL and Online, are chasing this skewed idea of authenticity, clinging onto the buzzword like a magic band-aid for all of our insecurities. The question is, are we too far gone to remember what that actually feels like?
Bowl Culture
Over the last decade capitalism has been on a generational run. The rise of the Bowl fast-casual restaurant has become the perfect compliment to the open layout office and individual laptop work of the modern day. A little package of essential vitamins and nutrients made to be so convenient that you can eat it at your desk (and continue to work)! Even the layout of the restaurants themselves are a perfect assembly line that would make Henry Ford’s forehead start sweating. You make your way down the ingredient conveyor belt all under the guise of customization and efficiency. You even have your pick of which genre of lunch bowl you want to wolf down in front of your email inbox. Mexican themed, vaguely Mediterranean, health curated, influenced by Asia, all with ingredients that will make you wonder if the only difference is what spices they put on the chicken. Slate walls, corporate minimalist graphic design, completely sterile interiors. The same but different. Besides the obvious wrestling of your deserved break time away from you, these setups sand off the little inefficiencies that give depth to living, the moments between moments that help you remember what you did that day. The Bowls themselves representative of a lack of presentation, care, and most importantly, demand for something better by the consumer. A pile of ingredients that do their job, nothing more. Under the pressure to be as efficient and time saving as possible under capitalism, the consumer has conformed to believe that this is just “how it is now”. I believe that these restaurants serve as a litmus test for the state of most other parts of “culture” as a whole in this moment. Everything feels just a little too Fast-Casual. Déjà vu inducing similar experiences in different fonts and with slightly different ingredients, “elevated” just enough to give the illusion of variety. We might have finally mastered spicy homogeneity.
Lookbooks Become Spaces Become Lookbooks Become Spaces
The uniformity of experiences doesn’t end at just food, it’s present in all types of spaces, both IRL and online. It’s extremely noticeable in the world of retail. Just like Bowls created the perfect vehicle to flatten the food experience, moodboards have done the same for design. Context gets thrown away in favor of an assemblage of individual “ingredients”. Instead of a rich thesis statement created from a strong conviction to say something, isolated elements are shoved next to each other in hope that they magically weave themselves together. A pair of technical sneakers with a linen shirt, a 90s basketball jersey with a midcentury modern chair, a VHS tape and a DVD player. Instead of creating a vibrant mix of elements, it all turns to grey mush, an Explore Page Bowl.
The expression “jack of all trades, master of none” comes to mind when trying to describe how the average retail space feels now. The concept of expertly specializing in something seems to be prioritized less and less in favor of a bland thesis spread as thin as possible trying to appeal to the most people it can. Every store needs a cafe, or chess, or community, or any other form of Elevated IG photo backdrop. These diet versions of genuine experiences seem to serve no purpose other than to feign being “cultured” when in actuality they’re closer to the candy bars at the Target checkout. I prefer my clothes from the clothes store and my pastries from the bakery. I prefer a steak with a side salad, not everything diced into bite size pieces and shaken into something resembling Bachelor Chow from Futurama.
However, this homogenization doesn’t just stem from trying to “optimize” the experience, its also a product of cheap and diluted imitation, which is only encouraged further on social media. Brands see a store with a cafe get popular and impersonate their bastardized idea of the formula they saw work for someone else, again choosing to ignore any context as to why it may have worked. It’s a breeding ground for social climbing, everyone chasing what they saw online before. They don’t want their own new experience or moment, they want a simulation of the one that already happened. Chasing the moodboard itself instead of trying to understand or create the images that comprise it.
The result is a lack of explanation for things, either because they don’t feel the need to, or they just can’t. Why would you want a room temperature $6 pastry 15 steps from the seasonal button ups when you can get a better one up the block? Why are there tastefully decorated couches and coffee tables when spending more than 15 minutes in the store feels like you’re doing something wrong? Why am I waiting in line for 30 minutes for this shit? Everything turns to some type of Yuppie Disneyland, a quick run through of so-called tasteful things bundled together and sanded down to be as bland as possible. The rough edges and character of the original, authentic versions of these things not only aren’t present, but are so distant that they can’t even be imagined by the consumer. They are too far removed from authenticity to know how to encounter it. No dealing with a gruff craftsman who has made the best bread for 40 years, no deals for paying in cash, no soul. Without any real substance, consumers don’t even know what to look for, left floating from line to line, placing their trust in the wrong places.
Lifestyle Dysmorphia
When these mismatched individual symbols and signifiers become the norm, it creates a new language. A schizophrenic means of communication removed from any history or context, a language of strictly aesthetics and approximations, not story. People can believe they want something without ever needing to think about why besides it being placed in front of them. Algorithmic ways of thinking only further reinforce this, tapping directly into the reactionary parts of our brain to churn out an equal amount of things that make us feel good and bad into a big Content Bowl. “I recognize that thing, and that other thing! This must be good.” As our brains begin to be trained like this, whether intentionally through macro manipulation or coincidentally from content grifting barrel scrapers, we are more inclined to accept what is presented to us without questioning anything. We voluntarily suspend our own skepticism.
In order to optimize consumption, much like Bowls, content now gets broken down into easier to identify and digest parts. The complexities and subtleties of authenticity are reduced to a follow-along recipe. This leads to something I’ve taken to calling “Maker-core”. Quirky, polished, and optimized for screens. Everything has to be either flippantly casual or overly regimented and “serious”. The rise of video content has been especially bad for this, since now there are hundreds of frames to worry about, not just one perfect image telling a story. Full subliminal curation creating an illusion of “perfection” when really it’s just better looking uniformity. All with easy to spot, recognizable elements. A cooking video set to chill 90s boom-bap dad rap or “exotic” jazz, maybe smoking weed (in a chill way of course), with the olive oil and tinned (NOT canned, never call it canned) fish with good graphic design. A Get-Ready-With-Me video that makes sure to show off the new Urban Outfitters lucite coffee table and stack of large font art books (unopened) because reading is important lowkey.
As all these elements get daisy-chained together, they start to become indistinguishable from each other. Any distinct flavors or quirks are quickly boiled down to make for a better sludge. Even the idea of variety gets mutated, leading to people thinking that a different colorway of the same shoe is the answer to the “played out” regular ones. Quickly, people begin to only trust the safe things they see work together and illicit a good response, never developing their own sense of taste. By doing so, they’re once again chasing the imagined “moodboard” existence, not the reality. You HAVE to have the tasteful chair to match the tasteful shoe to match the tasteful food to match the tasteful album. The same goes for what people believe is the opposite, or the proud “lowbrow” crowd. You HAVE to mention a chain restaurant or nostalgic IP in order to appear more down to Earth or subversive than those pretentious nerds. You HAVE to dress like a 10 year old that just discovered fireworks. The media and fashion and fast food you consume is entirely different than the ones they consume. The truth is, it’s all the same slop with different themes. Similar to the Bowl Restaurant packing up similar ingredients with slightly varied spices, content and references of all kinds are forcefully blended into an unintelligible beige slurry. Whether its a crocheted button up and an $8 matcha latte or an oversized Gangsta Spongebob tee and a can of Monster, it’s all a mess of individual symbols shoved next to each other desperately hoping they mean something more through the process. No interesting contradiction, no narrative or history, just purely surface level aesthetics.
The “language” that is created from these ways of consuming impacts our actual ways of communicating as well. Eventually after enough time is spent positively or negatively grunting at things, or making these vague, silent mental connections, we lose our ability to actually articulate our feelings toward something. Plug-and-play catchphrase reactions start to replace critical thinking. We begin to justify more and more under the “let people have fun” or “it lowkey goes hard though” umbrellas. Our personal standard for what’s considered good is lowered exponentially. The same is also true for the inverse side of the spectrum. “The __ with the __ is devious.” The visceral passion of disliking something gets replaced with lobotomized “ehh” or “meh” responses. At the same time, hyper-analysis in the form of niche memes keep the life cycle of anything drastically short, and life turns to a content farm meant for cynical self-exploitation. The panoptic gaze of coolness-climbing never rests, constantly vigilant of your relationship to others and their consumption like Patrick Bateman of the explore page. In turn, this helps homogenize the zeitgeist further by unconsciously reinforcing an objective Meta to adhere to without exception. Bland and lukewarm not only become the norm, but we start to demand more of it rather than risk being truly uncomfortable. The bell curve has never been bigger, and we have shown that the quality of what we’re presented isn’t as important as sustaining the high quantity of it. We crave filler. We want Bowls.
We see this Bowl attitude of quantity over quality in so many aspects of modern life. Stories that could be told in a well done 120 minute movie are now stuffed and spread out across 6-10 hours of Content via Limited Series, the succinct quality of the art not valued as much as killing more time. Dating apps are notoriously guilty for the same thing, a buffet of potential partners thrown in a pile for you to sort through, with the “deluxe” ones locked behind some arbitrary category (you have to pay for those). Communication on those apps degrades to match the impersonality of the experience, with most conversations feeling extremely stilted or unnatural, usually consisting of the same stock questions, responses, and other lines. Music and movie consumption get gamified through logging websites, where it becomes a competition to not have good taste, but have the most taste. Even IRL socializing becomes a numbers game, where networking and schmoozing become the standard and everything needs to be a Brand Actvation or pop-up or pseudo-Community event with 3 fliers. True, quality intimacy seems to be going the way of cursive handwriting.
A Case for Being a Snob
So where do we go from here? All this constant thinking about what elements comprise our Personal Brand or curating our lives is in simpler terms just normalized narcissism. As we get more individualized through these modern forms of consumption, we try to wrestle the idea of being defined by our relation to other things towards defining ourselves by other things’ relation to us. I argue that in our current modern life, it may be easier to identify, tame, and train this narcissism and image-obsession to our advantage rather than try to get back to a way of life that has long vanished.
As we become more hyper-vigilant and self conscious about what image we present, the most fulfilling way to construct that is start with the foundation, what we consume and how we do it. Sometimes, you have to learn to spit out bland food instead of trying to justify it. We have the agency to demand better, and by doing so can begin to form a real sense of taste. Not just in a performative “I’m better than others” sense, but because crafting it can bring you personal fulfillment not defined by others, or marketing teams, or trends. By consuming more consciously and with intention, by prioritizing quality over quantity, it allows you to focus on the details of an experience more. You not only figure out what you like, but more importantly you can piece together why you like it, the specific details and subtleties becoming clearer with less filler and noise. Trends start to become irrelevant because you no longer see products as means to an end, but a rich experience in themselves worth exploring longer. We can reject what is presented to us and demand better from the million and billion dollar companies instead of just taking what’s given to us. We have every right to ask them “What have you done for me lately?”
Curating an online image just doesn’t provide the same gratification as setting higher standards for your own private life. Just like establishing an exercise routine, training your consumption takes a conscious effort, but the results add onto themselves over time. Stopping to ask yourself, “why do I like this?” can give you answers that unlock even more than you initially thought. By slowly building up a strong sense of personal taste, it creates confidence in that taste. In turn, your presented image will come naturally from who you actually are or grow to be. Less maintenance is required when operating from a place of true authenticity. We should demand to be better friends, better partners, better shoppers, better eaters, better watchers, better consumers, not just for others, but for ourselves.
