Identity consumerism

Plug-and-play aesthetics and the loneliness epidemic

Can you tell I didn’t know what photo to use to represent this article?

Hey guys look at this photo of me and tell me what I could change to improve my face? What surgery would make me look prettier? I’m not fishing for compliments, I really want people on the internet to tell me how to improve my physical beauty, I do not think this will end badly at all. Do you think I have a high or low face weight? Do you think I suit gold or silver jewellery better? Do you think I have doe eyes or fox eyes? What colours suit me best? Am I a soft summer or a warm autumn? Can you help me figure out what kibbe body type I am? What aesthetic would suit me best?

These are all things people have genuinely asked strangers for answers on TikTok.

We’ve been concerned with their looks and asking people for opinions about the way we present ourselves for a long time (Remember r/rateme?) but to me this feels different.

In less than two decades we’ve jumped from reading magazine articles on the best eyeshadow for our eye colours to posting cutesy videos of ourselves welcoming strangers to give the harshest advice on our looks. Asking them to aid us in forming some of the deepest parts of our identities.

I think this goes deeper than thinking about our looks and worrying about how others perceive us. (Did people used to worry about being PERCEIVED so much before the internet?) Clearly, these minor obsessions about our looks are distractions. Whether it be a distraction we give ourselves from the major problems going on in the world, or a distraction fed to us so we don’t peer too deeply into the bigger fucked-up things going on.

Now I feel the reason we're so obsessed with this is because we lack any personal identity anymore.

We don't know who we are or where we fit so we find solace and 'community' in these places, in the way we look, in our comparisons with others who look similar. In the clean girl, cottagecore, hygge, art hoe aesthetic. We crave an identity so badly that we build one around the tone of jewellery we prefer to wear and the shape of our bloody eyes.

It’s not just the way we dress that is influenced by these aesthetics, they seem to spread across whole lifestyles. The classic clean girl aesthetic had a deluge of videos across TikTok and YouTube giving guidance on how to be a ‘clean girl’–we seem to cling onto these identities as a guide on how to live our entire lives. 

This is something I find especially interesting because in the 21st century, the majority of us lack clear guidance on how to live our lives. These aesthetics provide a compass–albeit a shallow one–for creating an identity in an increasingly lost society.

In Tyson Yunkaporta’s new book Right Story, Wrong Story he writes about how in his Indigenous culture, they find their identity in relation to other people. “In our Aboriginal communities, when people first meet you they will often ask ‘Who owns you?’ That doesn’t signify a property relation–it is all about what groups, pairs and lands you belong to in your relationship, which are governed collectively. Belonging and ownership mean something completely different from possession in our world. It means being in relation to family and community and place. Your belongings are not your property, but your connections.” 

In the Western world, it seems our identities are nothing but our belongings. 

Even if we look at the types of identities we used to form around us in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they feel different. Though these were often still based around clothing, music, and cultural moments, they were more hard-earned, taking time to build upon and grow. 

Now it doesn’t take months and years to build these identities up anymore, you simply fill your cart on Shein with the right clothes, find a fitting Spotify playlist, make some friends on TikTok and suddenly you are THAT person, part of this new identity group. Something some has achieved in mere days.

Our clothes, jewellery, and makeup are so disposable that visual identities that meant something powerful in the past are now plug-and-play. I’ve come across countless punk rockers who are dressed head to toe in fast-fashion, slave labour clothing, or those who don hippy, new-age clothing but are not-so-secretly part of the alt-right. 

Our identities–and how we present ourselves to the world–are so easy to buy and shift that it's almost as if we struggle to have any sort of identity at all.

I really hate criticising teenagers having fun–there is way too much of this online. I am not writing this from a place of shitting down on these people. I have been in their exact position. I have been swallowed by fandoms and aesthetics and found friendships, inside jokes, and community inside of these places. A community I struggled to find anywhere else.

But, it’s not harmless fun anymore–which is where the problems begin.

These disposable, pick-and-choose, swap-in-and-out aesthetics celebrate an eye-watering amount of consumption. There are TikToks posting hundreds of dollars Shein hauls for the aesthetic of the moment, aesthetics that cycle in and out on a weekly basis.

Our consumption of clothing from fast fashion brands like Shein is choking the planet. Investigators found Shein added between 2,000 and 10,000 individual styles to its app each day between July and December of 2021.

It’s well documented that fast-fashion clothing is of incredibly low quality, and most end up in landfills across the Global South, taking over 200 years for the materials to decompose. We can see mountains of textile waste from space–and it’s only getting bigger.

And if we’re talking fun… are those who are buying this clothing at such a rapid pace actually having fun? Because 40% of British teenagers say images on social media have caused them to worry about body image, and 61% of 10 to 17-year-old girls have low self-esteem.

Our identities form our communities, and we’re clinging on because loneliness is currently a global health concern. It’s hard to quantify ‘loneliness’ but surveys that have tried found globally 1 in 4 young people feel guilty, and in the US 52% of people regularly experience loneliness.

How can we unhook the claws that the industrial consumer society has wrapped around us?

I believe it goes beyond simply being happy in the way you look. Of course, contentment in our lives and appearances means we will consume less, but this goes a little further, we must discover different ways for people–especially young people–to find connection, identity, self-worth, and even joy in non-consumerist ways.

What does this look like? I can’t tell you because I have yet to find the full answer myself. But in my experience of trying to slowly piece together a life of contentment and connection, a life of joy outside of consumption, it’s about collecting little moments in the cracks of daily life. 

I find a sense of self-worth in my hobbies. Identity in the things I create from my hands, in how I treat others. Community in group sports or activities with friends, in showing up when no one else is. Joy in nature and stories and laughter. 

I’d love to say none of this ‘identity consumption’ pulls me in anymore, but it’d be far from the truth. From time to time I still find my fingers twitching towards my old Pinterest boards, I will drown in a spiral of ‘find your colour season’ and ‘the best clothes for your body type’ videos, I stare at the product page of a mascara that promising life-changing results and contemplate whether £80 is really that expensive. 

These are beliefs and pressures we have to realise, understand, and unpick one day at a time. 

P.S. If you enjoy my writing, you can buy me a coffee to fuel my work.