The Aesthetic Trap: Why Even Our Rest Has Become Performance

"You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.” Toni Morrison’s words are simple, but in today's world, they feel radical. 
Because we now live in a toxic duality: you either hustle, where every action must have an outcome, or you live the “soft life,” where rest must be beautiful, aesthetic, and pleasing to others. 

But what about the mind? What soothes the brain, not just the Instagram feed? Where is the middle path — the one we’re all forced to find when life gets too hard, but which no one talks about anymore because it’s not glamorous enough to post? 

We've glorified the extremes and forgotten that most of life exists in between. 

You decide to go for a walk — just one day — but the question pops up: Was it meaningful? If not, was it a waste? It wasn’t, maybe not for others, but for me, it mattered. Still, it has to mean something, right? “Nothing” doesn’t hold space anymore. 

We don’t just make coffee — we make morning rituals. Even joy is optimized. Every activity is weighed against how it looks, how it performs, how others will see it. We do what pleases others’ eyes, not what pleases our own minds. 

We run to be productive, to check off checklists. And when we say, “Today was hell of a day,” there's a strange sense of pride. But when we say, “It was just a boring day,” it sounds like failure — or worse, laziness. The “meh” day has died. Or it sulks quietly, hidden, because we’ve internalised our own Instagram feed. 

We’re not resting — we’re documenting rest. In all the pink candles and rigorous gym reels, we forget the very real roads of burnout, financial anxiety, mental health dips, and just… existing. What if we just want to lie beside a pile of clothes, too tired to make the moment aesthetic? 

Can we uninstrumentalize time? Can a meal just be food — not gut-healing, not green, not a post? Can a day be slow, boring, restful, or even ugly… and still not be wasted? 

The Attention Economy and the Aestheticisation of Rest

Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing touches on this profoundly  — the idea that stepping away from constant productivity isn’t laziness but a quiet rebellion. But it’s not just about rest. It’s about how our attention has been hijacked. We now live in the attention economy, where your focus is the most profitable currency. Every scroll, every click, every second spent watching someone else’s curated life is money in someone’s pocket — and a piece of your peace lost. That’s the invisible exhaustion no one warns you about: the mental load of constantly witnessing lives that look more purposeful than yours. 

Think about those “day in my life” videos — calm music, clean sheets, matcha lattes, gym, journaling. They package daily life into content that performs productivity and rest in perfect harmony. But it’s a fantasy. Most people don’t have that kind of time, money, or energy. Still, when we compare our ordinary day — laundry, re-heated food, half-finished thoughts — it feels like failure. Even our basic needs have been restructured by an aesthetic hierarchy. 

In this fast-paced world, we need rest. We need stillness. We no longer need to be visible all the time — sometimes, disappearing is also healing. Photogenic rest is a trap. It tells us we’re pausing, but really, we’re still performing. We’re no longer living for ourselves — we’re living for the feed. 

 Views expressed by the author are their own