Gemma Spake

If you listened to our How to Stop Taking Things Personally episode, you'll know this very well.

Only 22% of our daily thoughts are spent thinking about other people.

And often, even when we are thinking about other people, we're thinking about their behavior in relation to ourselves.

So if we're judging somebody else's outfit, it's not really about them.

It's about us and our lack of confidence to wear that.

If we are looking at somebody else's coat, perhaps part of it is because we wish we had the boldness to wear it.

social media has definitely exacerbated this has definitely made this harder and it's partially responsible for I also think how fast trends come and go these days um because we are all judging ourselves based on this impossible what's hot what's not that changes every few weeks like what was the print that was like trending a couple weeks ago like deer print

I was seeing all these articles about like, deer print is in, deer print is the next thing.

And then just last week, there was this TikTok being like, deer print is cheap.

Deer print is last season.

You can't win.

When you are judging yourself against the imagined current status or current state of what is cool and what's not, as soon as like you adopt the trend,

the trend goes out of style because the moment that more than 50% of people are wearing what is cool, it's no longer cool anymore because it's gotten too public and it's no longer something people can gatekeep.

The author, Paula D'Elia, she talks about the fact that social media fashion culture has actually increased self-objectification and comparison pressures.

And that actually means that

style and fashion has suddenly become incredibly basic and that a lot of our personal style choices are really based on like what looks good based on a trend what we think will photograph well what we think will get likes or what we think will look right next to everybody else most of our fashion choices are for the feed

And the more you lose touch with what you actually enjoy or feel best in, the worse it becomes and the harder it is to come back.

And the harder it is for society as a whole to have originality.

I read this other article that talks about this thing called aesthetic convergence or a narrowing of what is most often shown, liked, copied and worn.

So essentially, this researcher did all this analysis and found that