Turns out, there's nothing wrong with being a little unhinged in everyday life. Even recent popular culture trends show us that people are sick and tired of presenting polished and perfect versions of ourselves. We all collectively declared the summer of 2024 to be Brat Summer after singer Charli XCX's album aesthetics of being unapologetic, messy, and unyielding to societal expectations.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh became a New York Times bestseller and Entertainment Weekly's #1 book of 2018. What's more, it was an aesthetic darling on many people's social media feeds. It's a book about a woman who decides to go to sleep for a year with the help of medical substances. If that's not messy and unhinged, I don't really know what is.
Perhaps we're just all tired of artificially curated feeds? For a long time, we've been told not to compare ourselves to our friends and the people we see online. For our mental health, of course. We only see a fraction of what people post online, and they post only the good stuff. In a way, it's all a lie. Or, in the words of comedian Dave Chappelle, "Twitter is not a real place."
But if it's not a real place, why does it affect us so much? Why do we feel the need to appear perfect on our feeds, and we look up to influencers for beauty, fitness, or even lifestyle advice? It's all part of wanting to belong, of course. But it seems that the tide is changing: at the moment, belonging online means sharing your mental health struggles, sharing slightly unhinged opinions, and, most importantly, being relatable.
Some people believe we should all embrace being unhinged on social media. Writer and independent bookstore manager Sarah Olson agrees. "In an age where news headlines are borderline absurd, everything feels insane, and the world is going to [pieces] — being a little unhinged is a perfectly reasonable reaction," she writes on her Medium.
"We're all struggling with our mental health. We're all prone to making mistakes or going off the deep end. We all have baggage," she asserts. And, really, in an age where AI slop and sponsored content are ruling online spaces, realness is what most of us crave.
On the other hand, that "realness" can be curated to seem just like the real thing. Brand strategy consultant and educator Eugene Healey writes for The Guardian that Gen Z and Gen Alpha brought rawness and deliberate chaos to social media. Bedrotting, finstas, and sloppy photo dumps – the alpha and omega of relatability. Unfortunately, this authenticity soon became a performance, too.
"Filming oneself bawling into the camera, extreme overshares, breakdowns in public," Healey writes. "Vulnerability-as-aesthetic, where what began as a rejection of perfection has become its own form of perfectionism – the flawless e*******n of being flawed."
According to Healey, we can't even be authentic in real life because we're under constant surveillance. Have you ever been to a concert and felt too self-conscious to dance like no one's watching because someone might film you and you'll end up on YouTube?
Healy observes that that's why many of us should turn to other spaces. "If we want authenticity, we'll need to unwind our culture of surveillance – to create spaces where actions aren't immediately documented, dissected and distributed."
What are these spaces? Private conversations with friends that are for friendship and intimacy's sake, not for sharing online. Activities and hobbies that don't need to generate engagement and that we enjoy because we like them, not because we want others to feel jealous or perceive us as cool when we share them online. That might seem impossible in this modern age, but these are just some of the ways for genuine self-expression.
