Your Aesthetic Is Valid, Even If It Doesn't Look Like Theirs

a warm, honest chat about aesthetics, comparison & finding your own beautiful

"Aesthetics is not a standard. It is a language, and every single person speaks it differently."

Hey Sunny, 💛

a little definition, ...

The word aesthetic comes from the Greek word aisthetikos, meaning "of sense perception." At its core, aesthetics is simply the study of beauty, what we find pleasing, meaningful and visually satisfying. In philosophy, it's a whole branch dedicated to understanding art, beauty and taste. But somewhere between Aristotle and TikTok, it became something else entirely. It became a checklist.

In today's world, when someone says "aesthetic," they usually mean a very specific, curated visual vibe. Think: cottagecore, clean girl, dark academia, coastal grandmother (yes that's real and yes, I love her). These are mood boards brought to life, and honestly? As a concept, they're gorgeous. The problem is when we start treating them less like inspiration and more like a standard we have to meet.

Aesthetics stopped being about what you find beautiful and started being about what they find beautiful. And that, my dear sunnies, is where things start to get a little messy.

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The TikTok Video That Started It All...

"We walked into the room but never actually arrived — too busy making sure the room looked right on camera."

TikTok got me again. Yes, I know, at this point we simply have to accept that TikTok is basically my primary news source, my therapist, and my most chaotic best friend all rolled into one. I've stopped fighting it. I saw a video, it made me think, and now we're here having a whole conversation about it. You're welcome. 🌿

So, here's what happened. I'm minding my own business, doing my usual TikTok scroll (at an hour I will not disclose), and I come across a creator talking about how aesthetics is quietly killing our gatherings. The argument was simple but hit surprisingly hard: people are so focused on how things look, the tablescape, the outfits, the lighting, the vibe that they forget to actually be there. They forget to laugh too loud, eat messily, and have the kind of fun that doesn't photograph well.

The comments? Oh, the comments were a whole TED talk on their own. People were agreeing passionately and adding receipts. Someone said it was ruining friendships that they felt judged for not being "aesthetic enough" to hang around certain people. Someone else said they stopped going to events because the pressure to look curated was just too exhausting. And I sat there reading all of this thinking. okay but what is it doing to us on the inside?

Because yes, it affects gatherings. Yes, it affects relationships. But I think the most quiet, underreported damage? It's the damage it does to how we see ourselves.

When the Aesthetic World Made Me Feel Like I Wasn't Enough...

"She watched beautiful lives through a screen and forgot, for a moment, that hers was beautiful too, just differently."

Can I be embarrassingly honest for a second? Good. I knew you'd say yes.

There was a season of my life where I would watch self-care vlogs on YouTube and finish them feeling worse than when I started. Which is deeply ironic, if you think about it. I'd watch a girl with a linen-draped bedroom, a skincare shelf that looked like a boutique, and a morning routine that apparently began at 5am with matcha and journaling, and I'd look around at my very regular, very unfiltered life and think: why doesn't mine look like that?

I tried, bless my little heart. I bought the candles. I attempted the "clean girl" aesthetic (turns out effortless takes an enormous amount of effort). I reorganized my room three times trying to make it look Pinterest-worthy. And every single time, something felt off. Not because my space was ugly, but because it wasn't mine. I was decorating a character I thought I was supposed to be, not the person I actually was.

And the exhausting part? The trends kept changing. One month it was minimalist. Next month maximalist was having a moment. Then cottagecore. Then mob wife aesthetic (which I will admit I was briefly obsessed with). Keeping up felt like running on a treadmill that someone kept setting faster and faster while also asking you to look pretty doing it.

Society Built an Aesthetic World, And Forgot to Ask If We Wanted to Live in It...

"A world obsessed with how things look slowly forgets to ask how things feel."

Here's what I think happened. Somewhere along the line, helped generously along by Instagram, Pinterest, and the entire concept of the mood board, society decided that beauty had a template. And that template got very specific, very fast.

Your home should look a certain way. Your body should look a certain way. Your morning routine, your bookshelf, your coffee mug, your laundry drying on the rack, somehow even that has an aesthetic now. And if your life doesn't naturally look like a carefully edited photo dump? Well. The internet has some very passive aggressive ways of letting you know.

We started feeling shame for owning mismatched furniture. For having a skincare shelf that's more "drugstore on a budget" than "glass bottles in soft morning light." For living in a home that looks like, you know, someone actually lives in it. We started looking at our very real, very human environments and calling them not enough. And that, if you ask me, is one of the quieter cruelties of the aesthetic era.

But Here's the Plot Twist Nobody Talks About...

What if your aesthetic isn't missing? What if it's just entirely, wonderfully yours?"

One day, in the middle of yet another failed attempt to make my space look like someone else's, something clicked. I looked around at my room, at the random mix of things I loved; the book with the cracked spine on my bedside table, the slightly chaotic corner where I keep everything "I'll deal with later," the fairy lights that are maybe one too many and I thought: this is actually very me.

And "very me" turned out to be exactly the aesthetic I'd been looking for all along.

Here's the thing that the algorithm conveniently forgets to mention, aesthetics is not one-size-fits-all. It never was. The original point of aesthetics, that beautiful, ancient philosophical idea, was about personal sense perception. What you find beautiful. What you find meaningful. What makes your particular soul feel at home.

For some people that's clean lines and neutral tones and a perfectly organized kitchen. For others it's maximalist color and layered textures and a joyful, glorious mess of things they love. For others still it's somewhere in between, a little chaotic, a little considered, entirely human. Every single one of those is valid. Every single one of those is, in the truest sense of the word, an aesthetic.

Reclaiming Your Own Kind of Beautiful...

"Stop decorating your life for an audience. Start living it for yourself, loudly, softly, messily, gloriously."

So, what do we actually do with all of this? Because I'm not here to just point at the problem and dramatically sigh about it. (Okay, maybe a little dramatically. But only a little.)

I think the first step is simply noticing when aesthetics stops feeling inspiring and starts feeling like pressure. There's a version of scrolling through beautiful spaces and feeling genuinely excited and creative. And there's a version where you close the app feeling vaguely terrible about your own life. Know which one you're experiencing. And be honest about it.

The second step is giving yourself permission to define beauty on your own terms. What actually makes you feel good in your space? What colors, textures, objects bring you genuine joy, not because they're trending, but because they're yours? A worn-in couch that's perfectly molded to your favorite sitting position is beautiful. A shelf full of books in no particular order is beautiful. A home that smells like your cooking and sounds like your music is profoundly, intimately beautiful.

Beauty was never supposed to be a competition. It was always supposed to be a feeling.

To my Sunnies...🌻

"Your life is not an aesthetic. It is something far more extraordinary, it is real."

My dearest sunnies, if you have ever watched someone else's highlight reel and quietly decided yours wasn't good enough, I want you to hear this gently but clearly: you were lied to. Not maliciously, maybe. But lied to, nonetheless.

Your mismatched mugs are beautiful. Your imperfect morning routine is beautiful. The way you've arranged your little corner of the world, even if it looks nothing like a mood board, is a reflection of a real, living, breathing human being who deserves to feel at home in their own life. And that is the most beautiful thing of all. 🌿

You are not behind. You are not doing it wrong. You are simply living and that, in a world obsessed with performance, is actually the most radical aesthetic choice you can make.

🌿 ✦ 🌸 ✦ 🌿

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Come say hello on Instagram @_.selfcare_diary and tell me, what does your aesthetic actually look like? I genuinely want to know. And if you're craving a longer, cozier chat, pull up a seat at the podcast, Navigating Life Diaries. We'll be there, talking about all of life's beautiful, messy, real things. 🎙️