Is Everything About Productivity?
Rest and relaxation are a rare commodity these days. Even in the summer, even in a pandemic, every day needs an itinerary. Our lives also have to be meticulously planned out, or we run the risk of life passing us by.
Everyone has to have a five-year plan and a burnout plan. Every day has to be productive, or you risk wasting your life away.
Enter cottagecore.
The cottagecore aesthetic is a charming, bucolic lifestyle trend that glamorized the isolation of quarantine. If people were going to be social distant, they might as well be socially distant in style. It was also a reaction to a world that was reduced to work, sleep, and repeat.
Trends that cater to the feeling of nostalgia are not unique to quarantine. Before cottagecore there was hygge, and there will be more trends to come.
Cozy is the new busy
“All good things are wild and free.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walking.
The aesthetics of hygge and cottagecore are deceptively simple. People overlook the fact that a simple life is full of work. Yearning for a pastoral livelihood, the kind where you are literally working for your sustenance, indicates a certain amount of disconnect between an idea and its reality.
After I shrunk my favorite pair of work pants, I turned to TikTok for solutions. Now my feed is flooded with gardening, hiking guides, and life hacks galore.
Cottagecore entered our collective conscious in 2020 and companies were quick to capitalize on our obsession. It is ironic, though not unexpected, that marketing would lean into these ideas, even if at their core they are antithetical to trendiness.
The grass is always greener
When I picture my life, no matter how hard I try, I picture myself working. If the only thing I did was household chores, maybe I would have more time to cultivate my laundry. On the other hand, if I lived alone in a remote cottage, maybe I would miss the stability of modern life.
Stripped down to its bare bones, work is work. Like most people, I do a mixture of many kinds of work. I have a day job and then I come home and take care of household chores.
Recently, I tried explaining to a friend that I love having a designated laundry day. She started talking about how great multitasking while doing a load of laundry is.
I wanted to cry.
That, to me, was such a fundamental misunderstanding about what I love about doing laundry in the first place.
I still think about life and laundry
Can any of us love cottagecore — the good, the bad, and the ugly — knowing what we do about psychology?
There have to be things you do not to be a better person, but just to feel like a person. Maximizing productivity does not fulfill our souls. Neither does buying things.
Laundry might be on your list of chores, but it is also intrinsic to your day to day life. If there is something that is both productive and restorative, it is laundry. Throughout history, people have needed to wash their clothes. In the future, they will still need to was their clothes.
If I can unshrink my clothes, so can you. All it takes is a little baby shampoo, a drying rack, and some elbow grease.
Do you have a least favorite chore?
I took a brief three-year hiatus from writing on the Medium. Now that I’m back, I want to see who else is here.
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