My Problem with Aesthetics

Aesthetic is the it word right now. Some people have an aesthetic feed, some don't. We gush over someone's amazing aesthetic. We have aesthetic goals. We want our life to look aesthetic.

Are you getting tired of hearing that word in repetition? So am I.

First off, before I go tearing into my *cough* speech. Let's look at what an aesthetic is exactly.

Long story short: Aesthetic is beauty that gives pleasure.

But what does it mean to us? From my investigation, it mainly means having a color theme. Normally white with just a touch of succulent and fairy lights. But it can mean something different with every different subject (For book covers paintings and very few colors are aesthetic right now)

So what does it do? It makes people want to have aesthetic life's. We want to have a life that inspires comments like "wow, your life is so aesthetic."

I'm going to tell you something; there is nothing aesthetic about my life. Not even my Pinterest boards. I can't stay with one theme to save my life.

So now we get to the point of this post: if aesthetic is just wanting things to look pretty, why do I have a problem with it? 

Once upon a late night online, I decided I was going to be aesthetic. I was going to figure out how all these people did it, and I was going to do it too. Why? Because its pretty. Those people are the most popular. And it would be nice for once to have people say my life looked beautiful.

Once upon the end of my first week, I had failed and I was beating myself up about it. I just couldn't seem to stick to what went with the theme I had chosen. There were so many other things I loved.

I was holding myself to an impossible standard of what the internet thought was pretty. I told myself that it was just posting pretty pictures, it wouldn't make a difference. But it did. It made a huge difference. I was getting frustrated with my whole life and everything in it for not being aesthetic.

To me, trying to stay true to my 'aesthetic' led to a lot more detriment then it did good. It was like I was forcing myself to lie about my life and say it was petty so people would like me.

Now, guys, I'm not saying that all aesthetics are bad, or that having an aesthetic feed is bad. What I'm saying is that sometimes we hold our self to a standard so high that it forces us into a mold not made for us. We weren't all made to post white/green/fairy-lit photos, okay? We weren't meant to only read books with pretty covers. We weren't meant to hate posting a picture that didn't go with our feed.

Maybe we need to rethink our aesthetic. To ask our self's why we are doing it. Because if you're doing it because you love posting pictures that go together, and it just makes you feel happy, go for it. But if you're doing it (Like I did) because of pure pressure, and trying to gain followers, maybe its time to rethink. People may look at your feed and be impressed, but maybe there are other people who feel suppressed by the aesthetic movement and would be encouraged by you being different.

Do you agree? Disagree? I would love to hear your thoughts. I'm totally up for discussion on this one.