The Pressure To Fit Into A 'Core'

Lately, it feels like everything needs a label. Your outfit, your personality, your playlist, your habits, they all have to fit into some kind of aesthetic or “core.” You can’t just like a certain outfit anymore; it has to be clean, girl, coquette, indie sleaze, or something else someone named on TikTok. Even the way you act when you're exhausted gets called an era.

It doesn’t seem like such a big deal at first. Labels can be fun. They can make you feel like you belong and help you discover others who like the same things. But the more I see it, the more I wonder if it’s serving as an obstacle to being yourself without always having to justify it.

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It’s sort of like identity has become branding. You’re not just living your life, you’re performing it, curating it, examining your own thoughts to see if they align with the “vibe” people expect from you. Even the most basic things, like just sharing a picture of your coffee, are filtered through this lens of, “Does this fit my aesthetic?” or “What does it say about me?”

It becomes exhausting. You begin to question your hobbies, whether liking some random thing makes you “basic,” or whether changing it up makes you “fake.” It’s difficult to be real when everything you do is content. If you don’t have a definitive label, it can feel like you’re doing identity wrong.

The trouble is, people aren’t supposed to be quite that consistent. The majority of us are a mass of contradictions. You can adore a peaceful morning and loud music. You can be soft one day, and full-up the next. One day you’re wearing something hyper-feminine, the next it’s sweats. And you should not have to need a new label every time that happens.

Labels are not always bad things. Occasionally, they help us to feel seen or understood. But we are also more than the categories into which we fit. You are valid without title or aesthetics. You don’t have to look a certain way to like certain things. You can be random and cryptic and in-process. You’re free to not make sense to the algorithm.

Not everything has to be rationalized. Some things don’t have to be named. There are some things that can just be, and that is good enough.