sometimes i think

Sometimes I think the happiest people are not here where I am. Where we are.

Sometimes I think the happiest people are not on Twitter sharing hot takes and subtweets.

Nor being tres soft-filtered-light parisienne to their 15.6 k followers on Instagram while drinking coffee and eating croissants and casually dabbing their lips with some classic Parisian red.

Nor swatching the latest cream blushes and highlighters and eyeshadow palettes, unboxing subscription boxes or showing hauls or filming their daily meals or 5 am morning routines before asking us to just remember to hit the subscribe button.

Anti-hauls, makeup swatches, what I eat in a day as a model, my new york morning routine, unboxings, reviews, a day in the life of a harvard student, pretty little thing haul, how I lost 10 pounds following a victorias secret diet, inside this very famous persons complete unrelatable apartment in a ridiculously expensive city, inside the makeup bag of this or that famous actress.

The ever-present tide of little tidbits of soft consumerist porn which I surf all the day, every day, sometimes into the little hours of the night.

Surely, the happiest people are not here, inside those little cute YouTube video thumbnails, beginning their mornings at 5 am, 4.45 am, 4.30am (yes, really), showing us their beautiful french presses in tasteful bohemian kitchens in ridiculously priced brooklyn brownstones, before they show us their 38 step morning skincare routines and 28 piece timeless, time-capsule wardrobes, and dash off to their wonderful, fulfilling jobs, before returning home to unwind with a 50 step evening routine.

Where did ordinary life, the kind where you wake up and hit the snooze button one too many times, because you were up late worried that life is slowly passing you by, and then frantically search for last night’s tights and bra, because you were too tired to do laundry on Sunday and have nothing else to wear and have to get to this 9 am meeting and don’t have time for brekafast even though it’s the most important meal of the day (according to Kellog’s), disappear.

It was co-opted, coaxed, polished and staged until it became the perfect marketing machine to sell you everything possible you never even knew you wanted but surely needed, purged of everything but those elements that could serve as the aspirational, the unattainable fantasies meant, at once, to seduce and slightly depress, tantalizingly offering a future that remains just out of reach of one’s wallet.