Wish We Wrote #1 - Self-Love in the Age of Production
Ellie Muir's pushback on the romanticising yourself trend highlights the limit of empowering language in the age of production.
Hi, welcome to Dilemmas of Meaning, a journal at the intersection of philosophy, culture, and technology. This is the inaugural post of ‘Wish We Wrote’ in our Discovery series. Here I’m taking a deeper look at Ellie Muir’s article that went viral a few weeks ago on practicing self-love when the offline and online worlds blur. At the end of the day, perhaps there can be no real empowerment if our lives become a produced performance.
DOING THINGS ALONE ISN'T 'SELF-LOVE' - WE DON'T NEED TO MAKE EVERYTHING EMPOWERING - Ellie Muir
The first time I saw a movie alone was purely by chance. I was running late for a screening at 11 am. Limited to the south London buses, I sat stewing in traffic thinking of my waiting friends: 20 minutes ago, they realised I was going to be late and bought their tickets and snacks; 10 minutes ago, they broke into their popcorn and started clock watching; in 5 minutes, they’ll take their seats and start watching the trailers. I was hesitant to check my phone for fear of making real my imagined disappointment. Arriving in a panic, I focused solely on getting a seat. It was 11:10 on my phone so I hadn’t missed the start of the movie. Looking again, I also hadn’t missed any texts from friends waiting and wondering where I was. Sitting down as the Warner Bros logo entered the screen, I realise my friends had (stupidly) planned to see the film an hour before midnight. Still, I had already paid—and in my teenage years, disposable income was to be treasured. Since that day, I have frequented the cinema alone whether as a spontaneous choice, a need to focus on something for a couple of hours, or fed-up with moving heaven and earth to find the only time two (or more) people are free to see a film. Some have expressed envy, second-hand embarrassment, and outright derision. The most common reaction, however, has been a lack of interest. Most don’t care. The most interesting thing about seeing a movie to them is the movie, not the (lack of) company.
Turns out I’ve been wrong all these years. Paying and then sitting in a dark room for hours might have placed me at the vanguard of a revolutionary movement. In her Independent article, Doing things alone isn’t ‘self-love’ — we don’t need to make everything empowering, Ellie Muir argues against the championing of doing everyday activities alone as a radical act of self-love. Inspired by a viral TikTok celebrating an old woman leaving a screening of Barbie by herself, her article highlights the romanticising your life movement. Encouraged by those of a certain age and within their corner on the internet, the movement is a rejection of ‘glamour, exciting company or continuous enjoyment’ and so considers ‘solitude a triumph for self-love’. The problem, for Muir, isn’t that there is something wrong with doing activities alone nor should the single be chastised for celebrating a life lived well alone—positions she in fact disagrees with; instead, that by positioning the simply living your life as containing emancipatory potential we will be sorely disappointed. Muir concludes that we ought to accept reality for what it is: ‘it’s okay if the mundane doesn’t excite us.’
But is this really a question of misplaced expectations? Or is it just placing the fault within us rather than in a society that encourages us to turn everything into a produced performance–a society where every act no matter how small or done by others is seen through the lens of a grand narrative? In other words, is this a failure of expectations or a failure of method?
My timeline has been introduced to ‘hot girl walk’, ‘girl dinner’, and ‘date yourself’. Muir refers to this as a call from and to mainly young women to ‘romanticise their lives’. While the specific implication of ‘romanticising’ could be localised to (mainly female) TikTok, strands of this message can be spotted all around. From memes subverting to cinematic trope of (often) young men in dead-end corporate jobs but no real financial woes as their dream to others considering the curse of Sisyphus with its physical activity and daily routine a blessing. Perhaps it was only natural after a plague we seem to have rediscovered Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus and we wish to imagine ourselves happy.
However, the romanticising your life call is more than considering the search of meaning absurd. Rather than embracing the struggle, the call is centred on the common and every day. Rejecting glamour, exciting company or continuous enjoyment the mundane and often unaccompanied is given the associations of positivity previously exclusive to the former. Although this might be my biases talking. I’m no hero for going to the movie alone or really any activity performed alone because there is little pressure upon me to do them with others. Apart from activities designated as ‘coupley’, young men are able to move and act alone. From tropes of women going to bathrooms in groups to the expectation that women bear the brunt of maintaining social connections, perhaps rejecting the expectation that women ought to require company to enjoy themselves is itself a struggle. It is this emancipatory potential that sociologist Dr. Briony Hannell gets at: by appreciating ‘everyday poetics’, the patterns of daily life becomes celebrated, given meaning, and made interesting. Hannell however, also gets at the tension Muir’s article grapples with which is that, often the mundane is just that—mundane. How is the dissonance between doing activities that are fine but packaged with the expectation that you ought to feel romanced to be resolved? Going to dinner alone or taking a walk or cooking for yourself can be emotionally resonant but often (and let’s be honest most of the time) it is just fine. What then? What happens when you do the boring and it’s just boring? You open your phone’s camera.
You produce something.
I don’t want to pronounce judgement on young women wanting to film themselves doing the mundane. Not least because I have come across many a video of men ironing their bed sheets and doing what might uncharitably be described as a bad Patrick Bateman imitation. And indeed, the turning of everyday life into art has a history that stretches from posting your meals on Instagram to Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. However, unique to the romanticise your life trend is the framing of the smallest things as revolutionary by way of hyper-documentation. It is this that answers Muir’s motivating question: when did going to the cinema alone, or just cooking yourself a pleasant dinner, started to be seen as a triumph of independence? When you could document it.
Muir presents an eagerness to document all aspects of your life, even the boring and mundane, as in conflict with finding the sense of contentment. When you suddenly compare your life to an online lifestyle trend, your focus moves from yourself and the activity to what is being posted. This isn’t the same as following trends but the consequence of posting; to post is to want to be seen, to want to join an ongoing conversation. While I don’t disagree with Muir’s diagnosis, I think there’s something more here. If the mundane is mundane but is prescribed to you as an act of self-love or a recipe for living a more meaningful life, the natural response is to get that promise–that joy– from somewhere else. Performing for an audience is fun. I enjoy framing a photo just right or recording a short video about my road trip in a way that it’ll remind my friends of that A24 coming-of-age flick. There is a natural joy and comfort in glamourising the mundane and this is akin to the elevation you can gain from lighting candles, buying yourself flowers, or listening to music. Perhaps Muir is fighting the fight for semantics, that we do not have to pretend the mundane is revolutionary because we record it. But young people have realised they cannot just imagine Sisyphus happy and turned him into a wellness guru: we must imagine Sisyphus as aesthetic.
Yet, curating our everyday life into something that approaches aesthetic is work. That word is key because it takes effort to frame that photo just right, pick the right caption, or shoot a short video about your solo road trip so that it’ll remind your friends of that A24 coming-of-age flick. To post is to perform for an audience of nobody and everybody, this paradox turns every potential picture into an opportunity to be perceived. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a stranger. So we turn it into work, to produce something that we feel comfortable acting as a digital surrogate; something worthy of being perceived. I mean there is even a science to the Instagram dump. By virtue of existing on a platform of and for consumption, the romanticising part involves that manufacturing content. After all, the TikTok that started this was turning a mundane act, an older woman seeing a movie alone, into something consumable and shareable, into content. To be a social media manager is a full-time job with benefits, maybe even dental. Being a photographer, cinematographer, editor are all full-time jobs. Isn’t it curious that this kind of work is often directed at activities associated with rest and relaxation?
Muir’s solution is to let the mundane be mundane. It’s a good first step but it also forecloses the consciences raising potential of sharing and dispersing recorded performances. And in truth, that is a value worth celebrating. As much as some might roll their eyes at ‘normalise x’ there is a huge value in shifting the Overton window on certain things that remain socially abnormal. While it is easy for me to write that we must reject the negative connotations of that tag, ‘normalise being abnormal’ if you will (sorry). I write this from a place where society’s judgement has never played the role it might to others, especially in what I demand. If an online trend empowers some to be able to live free of judgement and enjoy their everyday poetics, should we really take a scolding tone?
There ought to be a separation, being able to support the gathering together to celebrate being niche, to feel a sense of belonging rather than alienation when you live life alone while recognising that production is a fickle god devouring all in its wake. Everything becomes part of this performance under production, yourself, your rest, and strangers. That latter point is important as this entire discussion began with a stranger being filmed without their consent. A woman saw a (great) movie and left, perhaps we have crossed the Rubicon in documenting and sharing the actions of strangers without their consent. There exists no injustice to be countered by the exposing actions to the cold light of day, nor is there an action that has flourished in the hidden depths and empowered by secrecy. Here the woman is forced to be a character, performing for the original recorder, the comments of the video, the article, and now this piece. She is forced to be a character rather than a person. Even her (probable) attempt to do an activity alone was turned into theatre and we become digital company.
I believe that focusing on production and not the excitement that comes from posting makes clear the real problem. This isn’t an old man yelling at the kids to get off their phones. Rather, it’s an appreciation that the kids are on their phones for a reason. Telling them otherwise is ignoring reality. Instead, I want to show how modern social media creates a feedback loop of enjoyment coming from production which is then repeating in search of more enjoyment. Case in point, imagine the actions of someone romancing their solitary lives: showing themselves doing things alone, preparing just the right evening dinner, going to a movie but with company. The actions will be almost the same. From this perspective, the romanticising your life trend is no different from the ‘glamour, exciting company or continuous enjoyment’ that it is contrasted against. All fall under the umbrella of producing so we can post. This might be freeing in a way, if the consequences of celebrating solitude and glamourising company are the same, why not choose the former if you’re so inclined. However, it comes with the accompanying caveat that if the consequences are the same, then celebrating solitude can be no more a triumph that company. Pick your poison, I guess.
As the dynamics of private surveillance, existence as a kind of performance, and the creation and erosion of niche places on the internet continue to interplay, perhaps we must be resigned to living aesthetic lives online if not altogether happy ones. To paraphrase the bard, if all the world’s a stage, perhaps we all become merely players.