Isabelle Wong / Daily Nexus

Another aesthetic. Another diet trend. Another fast fashion style everyone’s wearing. “Clean girl.” “Cottagecore.” “Girl dinner.” The simple ways that people are changing their looks, their diets, their way of interacting with people have become synonymous with social media. Self-curation to the point of self-policing.The phone in everyone’s pocket has left behind its well-intended mission of being a simple communication tool and has started to influence people to make elaborate performances out of their lives. 

The line between self-curation and self-policing has often been a thin one and social media is making it thinner. Self-curation has always been a part of people’s daily lives. There is an image in your head of how you want people to see you, and so you dress and behave in a certain way to meet your own expectations. Perhaps you wish people would think of you as athletic, so you wear running shorts and muscle tank tops. Perhaps you wish people would think of you as particularly put-together, so your shirt is always ironed and your hair always styled. This still leaves room for the athletic type to be in the library, or the put-together type to be at a mud run. It allows for the different parts of the self to be in conversation with each other, rather than in competition. It’s an intentional version of personal style that is perfectly at home in everyday life. 

What social media has done is escalate self-curation into self-policing. Rather than allow for the contradictions in style that come with the nuances of self and the multifaceted nature of people, social media has begun to prioritize an aesthetic over a sense of self. Self-policing comes into play when a person edits out any part of themselves that doesn’t adhere to the standardized Times New Roman 12-point font guidelines of a desired look. Rather than a curation of attributes that they wish to present, it is the cauterization of attributes that they want to remove. Your day has become a role you are playing, not a life you are living. 

The harm comes when people begin to craft a character they can no longer separate themselves from. You practiced lines for your part so much that you can no longer remember what it was like to an unscripted member of the audience, not part of a staged display. Think of the perfect spotlessness of influencers’ rooms when they make videos. The theme of their person matches the theme of the walls matches the theme of their clothes. This is not a room being lived in, this is a set an actor has come to inhabit. It has become hard to distinguish the real and the make believe. Fast fashion trends spring up as people try to reach for that level of scripted performance so at odds with the messy improvisation of an unfiltered way of being. 

Instead of a simple performance that can be left behind outside the public eye, social media trends are becoming internalized.  Diet culture is an example of how people internalize expectations to their own detriment, all to fit into a standardized ideal. Think of the social media trend of “girl dinner.” A playful, ironic way to engage with and criticize the harsh beauty standards placed on women for some, and an honest reflection of the type of disordered eating that has been exacerbated since social media began for others. 

The past fifty years has seen an increase in eating disorders among teenage girls as women in the media have decreased in size, and psychologists put forth this flood of media as a link between dissatisfaction with bodies to the point of harmful habits. Social media here— rather than encouraging the expression or exploration of self—has tipped over into the habits of reduction and restriction that come with self-policing. 

“Gym bro” culture also leans hard into the correct allotment of food for a standardized look, but instead of limiting, they often fall victim to high quotas of food and protein portions that must be met. Either way, the poisonous aftertaste of “girl dinner” or “gym bro” protein is lost in the internal monologue that they are performing their gender in the correct way. They are following the image that has been set out as desirable by companies trying to sell products, by their peers trying to fit in and find community and by the media that has come to dominate our interactions with the world. 

The aestheticization of the self has gone beyond cute trends that people can align themselves with, and has become a new type of rule-following behavior. The nuances and contradictions that come with the exploration of self are being curbed in favor of a single-bullet-point characteristic that defines a person. Social media has encouraged people to edit away the parts of themselves that don’t fit into a three second video, and it has turned people’s lives into a constant production of desirability. The stage lights dim, the curtains close and you are still performing.

Haley Joseph would like the curtains to close on this particular show. 

A version of this article on p. 16 of the Oct 3, 2024 print edition of The Daily Nexus.