Always never be optimising
It’s not the done thing, I know — but I’ve always kind of liked Gwyneth Paltrow. OK, she’s descended into self-parody now, and her refusal to acknowledge her outsize privilege is bordering on sociopathic, but I’ve always found her whole schtick quite comforting. Because she doesn’t pretend not to try. She doesn’t con you into thinking it’s all so effortless.
I’m OK with not looking as glossy as Goop because I’m not prepared to spend my days doing Tracy Anderson classes, steaming my vagina and eating spirulina. I don’t begrudge her any of this, because she’s open about it being constant hard work. It doesn’t sound like much fun, and I would rather have fun.
It’s all those other actresses, who claim to spend their days eating cheeseburgers and drinking whisky while still mysteriously looking like they last ate a carb in 1997, that depress me. They’re the ones letting the side down, doing us all a disservice by peddling the impossible ‘cool girl’ myth.
And yet, they are the ones we all subconsciously copy, because we all want to be the cool girl and trying is not cool. We won’t admit that it’s impossible. That we’re all tired.
Social media is basically just people copying each other without even realising it. We have all absorbed the language of ‘thrilled to announce’ and ‘some personal news’ — and we all use it, even when we have nothing more important to ‘announce’ than a photogenic countryside walk or homemade cinnamon buns.
We have all become wise to the old-fashioned ‘humblebrag’ and so we all try to circumvent it while still wanting to get the dopamine hit of actually-bragging and being rewarded for it. It makes me miss the days before we all learned the tricks of the trade — at least that was a bit more honest. OK, I used to laugh at people who would write long, earnest captions about their ‘perfect’ partners and ‘best’ boyfriends, about how ‘every day is better with him/her at my side’. But give me that any day over the exact same showing-off but disguised under the language of ‘THIS IDIOT’ or ‘another year and nobody got murdered!’. You’re still bragging about your relationship, please be honest about it.
Pretty girls taking vain selfies but now doing a stupid face in order not to look vain. Smug pictures of cute children under the altruistic disguise of ‘brightening your day’ (with the inevitable even cuter disclaimer of ‘not pictured: child throwing up on me five minutes after this ‘perfect’ picture was taken!!!’). Casually attractive women in yoga pants lamenting their ‘mum bun’ (don’t get me started on how childless women sometimes put their hair in a messy bun too) and how they don’t have any make-up on but they’re not sorry because they want to keep it real and admit that they just don’t have time for that sort of thing.
And that brings us to the most meta woman of all: the one who has reached the top level of Instagram (and now wants to charge you money so that you can reach those hallowed heights too).
She used to have a glossy, covetable job. Maybe she worked in fashion or film or PR. She might be a former minor celebrity. Then (perhaps due to spiritual enlightenment, possibly since ‘becoming a mum’) she realised it was all meaningless! She realised there was ‘more to life’ than all of the awards, freebies and adoration she picked up along the way.
Although, curiously, she talks about this former life far more than anybody ever asked her to, constantly reminding us all that she ‘no longer cares’ about such trifles as being friends with celebrities/fitting into sample sizes/going to glamorous parties. She is now so self-actualised that she is above that sort of thing, while constantly defining herself by its absence. She considers herself far, far superior to anything as crass as being an influencer. Her brand partnerships are all with companies that ‘really resonate with her’, you see.
And, in a curious twist of twenty-first century Instagram ‘feminism’ she wants to give you the incredible opportunity to learn how to be just like her. You too can be above this sort of thing, even if you never actually achieved a life full of those sorts of things. You can learn this amazing wisdom, while funding this now underemployed woman and her covetable lifestyle. She sells this to you while telling you she’s above selling this to you, throwing around terms like ‘authenticity’ and ‘integrity’. She might be trying to do it under the guise of writing classes, when she’s written a few self-help articles (and long jumbled photo captions), or ‘marketing yourself’ as she has made a career using her connections to do. Whatever it is, it’s not like those other tacky Instagram courses you’ve heard of. This is the real deal. Be prepared to get ‘gritty’ and really confront yourself.
We should all save ourselves a few hundred quid by instead reading Jia Tolentino’s smart takes on the topic (while remembering that in the interim we’ve all learned to hide the fact that we are ‘optimising’ a lot more than we did even a year or two ago), and wondering why anybody cares about Caroline Calloway anyway (is it a humble-brag to say I still don’t really understand?).
Most of all, what we can do is look to ourselves. I can acknowledge the fact that I do this too, on a small scale, a lot more than I would like to admit. I’ve stopped using twee phrases like ‘I did a thing!’ when I’ve written an entire book. I have never posted a picture of my handsome boyfriend while simultaneously calling him ‘this weirdo’ or similar. But I’m not above it. Very few of us actually are — particularly the ones who have made a newfangled career out of claiming to be.
So, the best thing to do is to come out and say it. I want to show off, too. And of course I want to look effortless, like I’m not showing off at all. I want to appear to be above that sort of thing.
I’m going to go full circle, kill this horrible insidious trend off by daring to speak its name. I will say when I have done something I’m proud of and want people to say ‘well done’. I will say that I wanted to post this flattering picture of myself in order to get attention. I wrote this jumbled article because I’m sick of these people and — in my superior self-awareness — I like to think I am better than them, while simultaneously feeling bad about myself because I am not as popular than they are. There. I said it.
Eleanor Wood is the author of STAUNCH (HQ/HarperCollins), a memoir about going travelling in India with her grandmother and great-aunts, and how spending time with her older relatives helped her to overcome late-thirties angst. You can mostly find her on Twitter and Instagram.
