what That Girl gets wrong about growth and self-reliance
the phenomenon of self-obsessed, self-optimized, lonely young women online
A few months ago, my Instagram reels algorithm started to shift. You see, I’d made the crucial, life-changing move of liking some weight lifting videos. One thing led to another, the algorithm fired its little digital neurons, and suddenly I was waist-deep in a sea of videos of Young Women Having Their Lives Together.
A lot of these videos start with a trendy, white-text caption that says something like “How to be ‘That Girl.’” The women (age-wise, I would distinctly say, not girls), wear claw clips. They have tops from Alo yoga. Cute gold hoop earrings, manicured nails, and clear skin from a painstaking, Patrick Bateman-esque skincare routine.
That Girl is, in the words of Jia Tolentino, entirely self-optimized. She doesn’t waste an ounce of time. She is a lean, mean capitalism-participating machine. Literally lean and mean, but more on that later. Also a key point: She’s very conventionally attractive. If you don’t have celebrity-level hotness you don’t get to be part of the club.
One of the key components of the That Girl lifestyle is a morning routine. She wakes up at 5 a.m., works out, showers, does her eight-step skincare routine, puts on clothes that fit her frame perfectly, drinks a smoothie, plans her day out in her planner with impeccable handwriting, journals, meditates, and only then can she go about her day.
Exhausting, right? Get this: At night, she gets home, lights a candle, deep-cleans her kitchen, makes herself some salmon, takes off her makeup, whole different skin care routine, journals again, reads a book, and falls deep into a peaceful eight-hour slumber (and reminds us that getting enough sleep is sooo important!).
It’s truly a lifestyle that only an influencer could have. That Girl is the perfect child of capitalism. She has never taken an SSRI or questioned her sexuality in her life. She has no problems with society — she has decided to dedicate her entire life to focusing on herself.
It sounds like a noble goal. Who doesn’t wish they had the time to look inward, practice self-care, eat kale, and get a reasonable amount of sleep? But the thing that struck me as strange about That Girl is that…she’s lonely. And it’s on purpose.
If you scroll through That Girl videos on Instagram or TikTok, you’ll find a common theme. These twenty-somethings preach that if you want to grow, you have to cut some people out. You may sacrifice social situations; you may lose some friends. But true growth is done by yourself, without any distractions.
Which frankly, I think is complete bullshit.
First of all, maybe don’t take your advice from a 25-year-old living in a loft apartment that her parents probably pay for.
But beyond that, it is such a lonely, terrible, capitalistic perception to believe that you cannot grow in the presence of other people. Like I mentioned in the microtrend piece last week, in the U.S. post-capitalist hellscape, Being On Your Own is the peak of self-actualization. Having your own apartment, your own car, not relying on other people or being in spaces with them, that’s the goal.
But the notion that you can only grow on your own by isolating yourself from other people is absurd. Especially in the context of a pandemic, I can’t imagine why one would want to separate themselves further from people if they don’t absolutely have to. The underlying idea of Those Girls is that other people have nothing to teach us, and get in the way of our growth.
Who are we without our communities? How would we know ourselves without people close to us who can offer an outside perspective, talk with us, argue with us, change us?
When I was in my ~study abroad era~ in 2020, I took a class under Dr. Carolina Escudero, who shared the work she’d done with a community of women who’d had their babies taken from them by the fascist Spanish government, and later by the institution of the Catholic church. It was a traumatizing phenomenon that went on for decades, and Dr. Escudero brought these women together, not necessarily to find their stolen children, but to heal as a community.
The philosophy they focused on was called Ubuntu. It’s a Nguni Bantu term and it is interpreted to mean “I am because we are.” It brought all the individual women together to form a whole, and emphasizes the idea that we are who we are because of our communities; that our identities are inextricably linked to our relationships with those around us. And while the campaign, called “Te estamos buscando” did hope to reconnect some of the women with their children, the important part was these women realizing that they were not alone.
It’s a distinctly Western and white American perspective that we should heal alone, as if we have all the answers to everything in our heads. The truth is we need our families, friends, partners, mentors, whoever, to help guide us and teach us. Because we don’t know it all. And the idea that we cannot grow if we give our time and energy to others is dangerous.
Not only is it misguided, it leaves room for Those Girls to focus on themselves probably to a self-destructive degree. As much as they claim to promote a healthy lifestyle, many of the videos are tinged with notes of disordered eating habits, glorification of thinness and whiteness, and patriarchal beauty standards.
Some influencers even make a disclaimer. They say, don’t worry: you’re still That Girl even if you go out with friends and drink sometimes. You can get back on track. Which is just further proof that friends and fun times out are inherently separate from the goals of the That Girl lifestyle.
So here is my question for That Girl: Congratulations, you are thin, you are productive, you are really into pilates, you meal prep, you own a lot of mason jars, you run your dishwasher as regularly as one should, and you keep a clean house. But does that make you better than the rest of us? Are you connected and interested in the world around you? Do you call your mom? Are you nice to the barista when you go to get your matcha latte? Or are you so focused on yourself that you can’t make vital human connections?
Is separating yourself from your friends and communities worth it as long as you can have a clean apartment, a medicine cabinet full of skincare products, and a six pack?
I've always known that those kinds of influencers are scamming their followers, but reading this made me clearly see how lonely these folks are and how they're trying to sell that off to us as well. Here's to forever *not being* that gurl. <3