Has your TikTok FYP taken on a gentler vibe over the past few months? It’s thanks to the rise of videos focused on a new way of living gaining popularity on the app: living a #softlife. The majority of the videos show people of colour – but especially Black women, who started this ‘trend’ – enjoying relaxed lifestyles, simple luxuries, and enjoying or celebrating the things in their lives that bring joy. It’s connected to other viral lifestyle trends, including Cottagecore, That Girl and Black Men Frolicking. Beyond being a lifestyle aesthetic, soft living can also be considered an important movement: it silently and simply pushes back against the social expectation that insists the life of a person of colour must be characterised by triumph over struggle to be valuable or fulfilling.
But is the soft life just an online fairytale or does it translate, and make a difference, in the offline world?
What is soft living?
According to the all-knowing Urban Dictionary, the soft life is a life of ease without requiring ‘hard’ work, sacrifice, and unpleasantness. It encompasses joyful, slow experiences such as taking a self-care day, trying a new hobby or even brunch with friends. Essentially, soft living champions the basic human right of a life that is deserving of ease and pleasantness. It’s similar to cottagecore, which attempts to assuage burnout with a passive enjoyment of life’s mundane tasks, e.g. romanticising cooking a weeknight dinner.
Some creators also tie in ideas of masculine and feminine energy as components of soft living – particularly asserting that women must be in their “feminine energy” to live a soft life. But it’s really easy to see through this. The only real requirement of the soft living lifestyle is ease and joy. That’s it.
@annemarie_akin a quiet life is a peacefully perfect life 🕊 #tranquility #peacefullife #afternoonchill #selfcare ♬ Summer Background Jazz – Jazz Background Vibes
How did it come about?
Some point to the pandemic as the spark that started the soft living movement. While it’s true that lockdowns forced us to slow down and re-evaluate our life priorities, the craving for more joy, less pressure started much earlier. You only have to look to other connected trends to see it: cottagecore aesthetic was coined on Tumblr in 2018; and the decline of ‘hustle culture’ traces back to 2015 with Girlboss CEO Sophia Amuroso stepping down and the WeWork crash in 2019. In other spaces, like the fitness realm, trends have moved away from peak Crossfit to lower intensity exercise like at-home Chloe Ting, pilates and yoga.
In 2019, public academic Rachel Cargle popularised the idea of ‘Rest as Revolution’ for Black women specifically, laying the foundations for a broader soft living movement.
To put it simply: we’ve all been getting tired for a while. And now we are finally, openly rejecting the ‘hard-life’. According to a recent study from Deloitte, 77% percent of people are experiencing burnout on the job. The Great Resignation is also only one of the small ripples showing that people are over it, with 74% of the disengaged actively looking for work. Alongside soft living, parallel video trends, like recovering from burnout videos, show people how to prioritise their mental health and the joy of life over hard work.
An act of rebellion against capitalism
If you think soft living is shallow, you’ve missed the point. In many ways, rejecting the need to be the ‘hard worker’ that capitalism demands is a form of protest. Gen Z in particular have chosen to reject the myth that struggle and ‘paying your dues’ are the only ways to succeed; long gone are the days where we give ourselves to our jobs without any boundaries. There has been a clear mindset shift encouraging us to invest in ourselves rather than in our workplace. Treating your 9 to 5 as your side hustle and living your life as you want as your main gig has become sort of a mantra to our generation. In fact, soft living seems to be expanding outside of just Tik Tok with more workplaces prioritising their employees’ lives outside of work and respecting their boundaries. Many companies are now trying to embrace human culture as opposed to hustle culture and four day work weeks are also being trialled out around the world.
But it is important to note that this trend does have a lot of privilege that comes with it. Time is a big factor in soft living – in fact, time is the biggest luxury of all. Not everyone is able to enjoy a Bare Minimum Monday, if they are working three jobs to support their family. For parents, the likelihood is very low that you would want to go to a pottery lesson after a full day’s work and getting a screaming baby to bed. And as with so many TikTok trends we see, as soft living reaches more people it appears to be expanding from its original premise of simple joys, into a need for material consumption. The same can be said of the That Girl aesthetic. What started with journaling and having a nourishing routine, evolved into a need for matching workout sets and aesthetic ankle weights. The $4.5 trillion wellness industry has also commodified self care, diluting this act of protest against capitalism that soft living is meant to be at its core.
At its core, the soft life is about bringing joy back into your life through leisure and simple pleasures, which means you don’t actually have to buy anything to embrace this lifestyle. Black men frolicking is perhaps the purest manifestation of soft living. There is no requirement to buy something to participate, it just prioritises joy through a simple action.
@caitlynkumi I saw this tweet that said do not “soft life” yourself into debt . There is nothing wrong with living a “soft life”just be financially responsible. #softlife ♬ original sound – Caitlyn Kumi
Rejecting the BIPOC ‘Struggle Survivor’ Narrative
The need for trends like this highlight how our systems do not allow for Black, Indigenous and other people of colour to experience a life of leisure and to embrace joy with no strings attached. We are emboldened in our suffering, taught that the only way to a life of value is through hard-work and struggle, ignoring the need for safety, peace, and love. Tik Tok creator The Naija Beast explained how the frolicking trend was about Black men having a space and an opportunity to openly feel joy. “I feel happier,” he said. “Too often we walk around with the armour on, the mean mug, we ain’t gotta be that all the time… Mental health is a serious situation in the Black community. Things like [frolicking] help mental health. I feel much better. So I want my brothers to experience that.”
Black women are the main soft living influencers right now, taking up space in a landscape historically dominated by white women. A simple picnic with friends is an act of rebellion against the stereotypical perceptions of Black women – boxing them in adjectives such as “strong” and “independent” has always ignored their human need for rest and joy. Soft living is a way for them to return back to those human needs, with Tik Tok becoming “a safe space where you can do the least and bet the most”.
As the lifestyle trend finds broader appeal, it will be interesting to see what knock-on effects will be created in the offline world. If we can maintain the crucial boundaries – a low emphasis on consumption, strict protection and centring of Black and Indigenous joy – this could be the quiet revolution 2022 needs.
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