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The Internet Wants Aesthetics. Humans Are More Complex Than That.
- May 13
- 3 min read
Social media has quietly turned into performance.
A perfectly curated aesthetic. A world that makes immediate sense to strangers scrolling past your life in less than two seconds.
Somewhere along the way, people started believing that individuality meant choosing a very specific aesthetic box and staying inside it forever.
The clean girl.
The old money girl.
The dark exposure creative.
The founder who only posts luxury hotels and matcha meetings.
The outdoors girl.
The minimalist.
The wellness girl.
And while everyone believes they are expressing individuality, most people are still operating within trends that have simply been repackaged as identity.
Aesthetics create recognition.
Recognition creates consistency.
Consistency performs well online.
And as founders, creators, or people building businesses publicly, we are constantly told that clarity online requires sameness.
The second something falls outside of that visual language, people become confused. And for a long time, I tried to force myself into that thinking too. I thought I had to choose one side of myself and make it digestible enough for the internet to understand.
Part of me loves minimalism, tailored silhouettes, old Ralph Lauren references, business dinners, and beautifully designed spaces. Another part of me loves being completely disconnected from all of it. Being in nature. Extreme weather. Silence. Adrenaline. Film cameras. No phone signal.
I subconsciously treated those parts of myself like they didn’t belong together. As if posting both somehow made my identity less cohesive. As if elegance and wilderness could not coexist. As if softness and intensity could not exist within the same person.
A lot of people are exhausted from trying to flatten themselves into one version that is easier to market online. Especially founders.
Founders today are expected to become brands themselves. Not just build businesses, but embody a perfectly curated lifestyle around those businesses. And while I understand the value of personal branding, I think we’ve quietly crossed into a space where people no longer feel free to simply exist as multidimensional humans.
Everything becomes strategy.
Everything becomes perception.
Everything becomes content.
Even rest.
Even hobbies.
Even identity itself.
People miss when social media felt human. When people posted blurry dinners, random walks, bad flash photography, coffee cups, chaotic friendships, little moments that meant nothing and everything at the same time.
People constantly say they miss that era, but nobody wants to be the first person to post like that again. Because now we are all too aware of being perceived. And I think that awareness is what has made the internet feel so emotionally exhausting.
Humans are not brands. Humans are layered.
One person who deeply inspired this shift for me is Caley Vanular. Watching the way she moves through life genuinely changed something in my perspective over the past few years.
One week she’s in extreme weather conditions, hiking for days, sleeping in her car, travelling through remote landscapes. The next moment she’s back behind her laptop working on FORAH, her skincare company.
Nothing about it feels forced. Nothing feels performative.
There is freedom in watching someone exist fully as themselves without trying to reduce their personality into one consumable internet identity.
There is a difference between presenting your life beautifully and curating yourself so heavily that you disappear underneath the performance of it.
Some moments deserve to exist without audience consumption.
And I think there are more founders who feel this way than we admit. Founders who want to build meaningful things online without turning themselves into products at the same time.
Founders who still value privacy. Who still value quietness. Who still want to create beautiful work without constantly performing their lives around it.
Maybe the answer is not abandoning aesthetics entirely.
Maybe the answer is simply allowing ourselves to become more human inside them again.
To stop asking whether every part of us matches the grid. To stop reducing identity into branding exercises. To stop treating ourselves like fixed visual concepts. And instead, just allow ourselves to evolve naturally.
To contradict ourselves sometimes.
To explore. To disappear. To return differently. To change our minds. To grow publicly without having every shift perfectly packaged beforehand. Because the people we usually connect with most deeply today are never the ones performing perfection. They are the people who feel real underneath the aesthetics.
Thanks for reading.
