Have you lit a candle today? Poured yourself a bit of wine? Or maybe made a quick trip to a coffee shop? According to TikTok, these are some of the steps to having a better life! In the past few years, the platform has seen a rise of the ‘Romanticize Your Life’ trend, which has also expanded to other social media, like Instagram and YouTube.
Although diverse in content and format, most of the videos from this trend shows the author of the post spending time doing activities normally sidelined in everyday routine due to the lack of time. Some of the most popular choices are buying flowers, saging your room, reading, preparing food and the ultimate champions: having an iced latte and lighting a candle!
Supposedly, by including these romantic practices in your life, you’d be more mindful, calm, grateful and, ultimately, happy. However, does this really work? Or is social media dictating the ‘best way of life’ with no guarantee of success?
To learn more about this phenomenon, Her Campus at Cásper Líbero talked to psychologists Marina Abud, who specializes in the study of the effects of virtuality on the contemporary individual, and Evelise Carvalho, Psychology professor who studies toxic behavior online.
Can 60 seconds provide an accurate representation of one’s life? Marina points out the part played by the editing on ‘Romanticize Your Life’ videos. She also explains how the human mind tends to complete the job.
“Editing is always part of the virtual world. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine a content that hasn’t suffered some kind of clipping or filtering. Still, they have this effect of conveying a message to the user. In these ‘Romanticize your life’ videos, I’ve usually seen that they have a quieter, more peaceful soundtrack, filters that make the colors less saturated, more pastel. That seems to me to be to create a certain message that ‘look, I live like a protagonist in a romance movie, everything works out in my life’”, she highlights.
According to the specialist, the choice of what is shown and the editing to which these recordings are submitted favor the projection of the viewer’s own fantasies: “We end up filling in the gaps of what is not shown in reality with our own fantasies. Even though we are aware that it is edited, we end up creating a lot of projections on top of that content […] Social media increases our projections and fantasies”.
“Our life has no soundtrack. I’m walking down the street without headphones, the noises in my life are cars, horns. They are not pleasant noises”, says Evelise. She adds that, besides the romanticization, many times, we are comparing ourselves to people who have completely different realities.
“The reality I see there is totally different from the one I live in. This makes my perception of what is happening start to become a little distorted […] It might also make me have a negative perception about my own life”, states Evelise Carvalho.
Exposure to several videos that promote the same way of life can end up becoming a new pressure for individuals. “In fact, it would be a repression of what is in the unconscious, an attempt to repress, to force oneself to have a specific life, within certain molds of what a good life is, according to the internet”, elucidates Marina.
She adds that, many times, doing these activities won’t make you feel better: “True self-care is being in touch with your emotional experiences, realizing what’s inside you, what you feel, good things, bad things and respecting all these feelings. What becomes of this in this capitalist world of networks is buy the lavender-scented candle or buy the iced coffee from that brand”.
Most of the ‘Romanticize Your Life’ videos promote an idea of planning your free time and spending it productively. Evelise emphasizes the importance of actual free leisure time: “Where did it come from that leisure has to be productive? Rest is an important thing in our life. Without rest, we don’t function. Non-productive leisure is extremely important”.
TikTok did not invent romanticization. In fact, some would say that it is intrinsic to the human experience as we can only see the world through our own eyes and that might involve a lot of idealization.
“The fact that there are romanticized ideals that we keep comparing ourselves to, envisioning, this has been going on forever and ever. It exists with films, with series. We have always lived through these processes of idealization, of ideals of a society. These are things that have always existed that are taking on new formats”, concludes Marina.
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The article above was edited by Clara Rocha.
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