The Total Tweeness of Self-Care

I googled “twee” and this was the first thing that came up.

Well, this is a fine time to be alive. Yesterday I didn’t know, but now I have discovered a new trend in Self-Care—Cottagecore. (New York Times alert):

It’s a Holly Hobbie illustration come to life, consisting of a coterie of young people, mostly in their teens and early 20s, who congregate online to swap bread baking recipes and photos of their foraged mushroom hauls, stare at pictures of farm animals and otherwise partake in an aspirational form of nostalgia that praises the benefits of living a slow life in which nothing much happens at all.

And

Cottagecore is related to grandmacore, faeriecore, farmcore and goblincore; other nostalgia-ridden aesthetic communities that, paradoxically, thrive on many of the most popular internet platforms of the day. What these cores have in common is a desire to live in a world outside the one currently inhabited. (The suffix “-core,” derived from 1980s hard-core punk music, is now used to delineate a type of genre or category.)

And

But if cottagecore’s dainty, precious visuals offer a corrective to the blank canvas of AirSpace, its preponderance of cabbage roses and doilies still falls prey to the same fallacy of minimalism: that by exerting control over one’s environment and making it appear perfect, one can regain control over one’s life.

And

Sarah Cavar, 21, a senior majoring in critical social thought at Mount Holyoke College, was drawn to the imaginary cottagecore lifestyle, following more than 600 farm animal-themed accounts on Instagram, until a reality check came in a visit to an actual farm. Mx. Cavar, who is nonbinary, became disillusioned by the proliferation of bugs, dung and the mortifying experience of having a goat spread its excrement “not only into the ridges on the bottom of my Birkenstocks,” as they wrote in a blog post called “Et Tu, Cottagecore?” “but also onto my thighs and the groin area of my shorts.”

And finally,

Things that do not exist in the cottagecore universe: frostbite, jobs and toxic masculinity. The rise of #MeToo — and, now, the inability of female candidates to get traction in the presidential race — has again stoked up buried rage for many women, and cottagecore offers a vision of the world where men are not consciously excluded; they are simply an afterthought. “Cottagecore is all about finally feeling comfortable and at peace, even if that peace is fake,” Mx. Cavar said.

Seriously, read the whole thing because there are so many well-turned, clever lines. I mean, I must confess, I don’t even know what a lot of the words mean, and I didn’t follow any of the links, so I haven’t learned as much as I ought to. But I do love a new trend, especially an escapist one. For instance, right now I’m reading a Mapp and Lucia book which is so funny, and allows me to entirely get away from any sense of reality.

Isn’t that the trouble? The internet, which we all so depend on to escape from reality, obtrudes reality upon us all, in one form or another, against our will. And honestly, I’m not a big fan—of reality that is.

Did I say that I read Roger Scruton’s Very Short Introduction to Beauty? Really really loved his definition of kitsch, and where it comes from, and how to get rid of it. So much of the self-care/wellness trends, I think, fall into the emotional kitsch bucket. They are gratuitous. They try to have life without suffering, beauty without pain (except in the goop world anyway, there is a considerable amount of pain, but to the wrong end), beauty without truth, self-actualization without self-sacrifice. It all leads, I think, to a very kitschy kind of narcissism.

Also, my new favorite word is Twee. I keep running across it and it’s so wonderful. I’m pretty sure that a lot of people would think all my aesthetic efforts, no matter their intended end, devolve into “twee.” And honestly, if someone offered me an actual cottage, and the time and money to do nothing but bake a lot of bread and…no, scratch that, I would go absolutely mad. The thing that I think makes life endurable is a clever balance between the things of the body and the things of the mind. It is a sort of twee irony to use clever marketing to build a following around something like “cottagecore” in which you pretend to have escaped from everything, but are really using it all to either make money or in otherwise survive and keep up your lifestyle aspirations.

Speaking of reality–which we aren’t–I have to go face the pathetic truth that a lot of my children can’t spell very well, at least for a couple of hours, by lamely trying to teach them to spell, even though they diligently resist all my efforts. Tinkerty Tonk (and I mean for it to sting).