Inspired by
A coffee shop near the office with tables no one photographs. Wrong angle for natural light, too close to the bathroom, and the wood grain runs in the boring direction. But it’s always available, which is why people sit there in the mornings before work gets demanding.
People waste time arranging their laptops, lattes or small potted succulents just so it catches the right light. When they finally take a photo, they up and leave their smile behind. Something I notice lately. Not with judgement—but in that I see so much care invested in proof of a moment and very little in the moment itself. How we bring plants home because the frame needs life in it. Or capture busy third spaces around us just to portray a significance to our gravity.
Some friends always look a little different in their stories than when we visit them. Online, there’s always someone capturing, as if by surprise, a vase of fresh eucalyptus, expensive candles with French names, or a throw blanket draped over the couch like someone just stood up from reading a novel. Look closer, the vase is empty, the candle has its real label half-peeled, and the blanket is wadded in the corner simply because the owner is lazy.
They know some of us know. But they still arrange it before showing their small world the story they’re writing and bringing everyone closer to the curated depiction of their life than the life itself. And when we watch people pretend, the way you might watch someone apply lipstick in a mirror—you can’t help it feel intimate, automatic, and somehow sad.
The word I keep thinking about is curate. It used to mean something museums just did to artefacts. Now it’s what we do on Tuesday mornings.
Every surface, a potential exhibit. Every coffee, a prop for resonance. Every lazy Sunday needing documentation that we’re doing rest correctly, that our exhaustion at least has decent lighting.
I’m guilty of it, but that helps me express the point. We’ve learned to light our depletion and frame our overwork. Burnout’s made to look intentional, like maybe if the exhaustion is aesthetic enough, it transforms into something else. Productivity. Hustle. A life well-curated.
But from what? For whom?
Like what on earth is this 5-9, followed by 9-5 trend? Nothing but superfluous energy drain. I think about my family and their homes, cluttered and alive. Life’s that revolved around a few things. Coffee rings on wood, because people drank coffee there, books torn and creased and cracked, sprawled away from a book shelf, because people were reading them. Evidence of use rather than performance. Of living in rooms instead of just arranging them
Nothing in those houses would have photographed well. The light was, whatever it was. The surfaces obliged to whatever we set down. But somehow this made visiting feel like permission to exist without optimisation, without proof, without the small constant labour of making sure everything looked like it was going well. And so many memories still exist from there.
Even when people show off their “undone” spaces, with laundry piles, unmade beds, covered desks that make the paper look like it floats. Even those are framed carefully, captioned with knowing irony, performed for people that expect the mess to mean something. Raw authenticity becomes another aesthetic choice. The unfiltered life, filtered.
Maybe this is what we’ve lost: the ability to let things be simply unremarkable. A mug that’s just a mug, chipped at the rim, holding coffee you drink while staring out the window at nothing in particular. A bedroom that looks like someone actually sleeps there. A Sunday that just… passes.
It’s become easier to perfect the frame than to sit with what the frame is hiding. How staging rest can feel like rest when the actual rest seems impossibly far away.
The coffee shop closes at six. But the light has moved on anyway, and all the carefully arranged corners fall into ordinary shadow. Maybe that’s when the day begins—when no one’s looking, when the performance effort can finally drop, and when we can exist in rooms that are just rooms, talking to each other and living lives that don’t need sparkle to be real.