💡 In Defense of Beige Influencers
A response to the overwhelming over-optionality of today’s society
A Tiktok video amasses millions of views. A couple thousand admissions of distaste and digital distress signals make their way to the comments. What’s the video on? The routine of a 28-year-old man working a 9-5—packing his laptop bag, driving to the office, slotting playtime with his dog at lunch, and completing his day with exercise, dinner and Hulu.
He garners support from the kind of people that never do more than one weekend with post-vacation flotsam at a time, who thrive in feeling tethered to structure and rhythm so regimented it runs like clockwork. To be unmoored from your source of stability would be defiance of your method to the madness.
So what exactly is wrong with it? Besides the flatbread microwave meal and a questionable taste in coffee table books, nothing much really. The criticism lies with mish-mashed disdain for beige furniture and even beiger clothing in the surrealist, maximalist zeitgeist we’re reveling in. Niche micro-influencers, oversized everything, new-wave packaging, and even the algorithmic purchase that is your existence, all welcome overripe individuality. Stand out or give in—if you’re not already paying for the product, you are the product.
So if the joys of optionality are truly under-realised with the flexibility afforded today, can we explore the privilege there is to oppose an equally abundant hunger for stability?
How shocking it is that young people who grew up in a financial crash with the most uncertain job market in decades, stagnating incomes, and a global pandemic wedged in between the prime of their lives might glorify normal, predictable, and comforting lifestyles. Accelerationism is often not by choice, but by circumstance.
What really rests below these mundane concerns of commerce and the open-pit mine of choices are chorus lines of workers under modern colonial labour, scarce educational institutions, and minds that’ve been conditioned to always crave more.
An escape from the ouroboros of commoditised production and consumption is a language not many even know of. It’s difficult to have enough money to leave the rat race, move away to the country, and remove yourself from the hustle and bustle to engage in emerging movements like solarpunk—that ironically draws from Indigenous practices—and lifestyles like homesteading. In fact, a homesteader on Instagram admits this exact liberty.
What with 85 Oreo flavours since its creation! Hot chicken wing oreos, apple cider donut oreos, cherry cola oreos—that’s mains, dessert and a drink in three (greedy) bites! Oreo’s brand director claims the reason there are so many different flavours of Oreos is because the overabundance of choice makes us nostalgic for the original.
There’s just too much of everything, so we’re deciding to peel back.
When the return to Proustian simplicities smother the noise of their hollowed-out derivatives, people become more cognisant of their ability to make space for unselfish and untroubled success. This is what I simply like to call, contentment. When I manage to cut through the mechanical and practised fluff of 9-5s and pursue lifelong friendships, hobbies, personal callings, and well-deserved self-treats, I don’t exactly feel beige. In more accurate Banshees of the Inisherin language, I’m both Padráic and Colm at once.
I can’t say in confidence that I'm not selling myself as the picture-perfect pliant employee, but I’m simply writing to come to terms with the reality most familiar to the circles I move in. If I manage to break the cycle of beige, maybe I’ll return to this take with newfound scorn. In the meantime, I’m all in defense of beige influencers.
Digestion in Rotation
Of Common Clay has taken on a more serious and informational tone over the last couple posts given the topics covered. I sought out to return to more candid reflections, much like my older works. In line with that, let’s break away for a bit with my media consumption rotation!
But the Girl by Jessica Xhan Mei Yu
Though I’m not finished with it, But the Girl rips guttural reactions out of me in eloquently describing thoughts on alienation, Asian achievement, and misplaced affection in migrant families. It follows the story of a Malaysian-Australian girl weaving through personal pains while writing a novel and working on a PhD on Sylvia Plath’s poetry. For lovers of Crying in H Mart, philosophy and self-indulgent introspection, this one’s for you.
This study playlist of mine is a sequential lineup of reruns to slower nostalgic roots, later picked up by bouncier distorted synths and punchy anthems. It’s for R Studio coding homework, arguably.
There's a video I watched recently on an interview with David Foster Wallace on consumerism. The whole thing is a must watch, but there's a part which I think relates to what you talk about here -
https://youtu.be/P1PC1sArw70?si=rREQwyo2p8ttrtUc&t=347
5:52-6:06
"Do what you want, gratify your appetites, because when I'm a corporation appealing to the parts of you that are selfish and self-centered and want to have fun all the time, is the best way to sell you things."
When you talk about the mass critcism of a person trying to live a stable, simple and quiet life it speaks to how we've been conditioned to believe that excess is good, that our values are now so individualistic that we have this constant "abundant hunger for more" as you mention. In the video, he even talks about how we can't still anymore, that silence is deafening to us, and we crave constant stimulation. It's crazy that this was 20 years ago, it really feels like things have only accelerated from that time, and what you have written perfectly captures this reality we live in.
Great article ❤️