When you feel like you may’t sustain with trends anymore, you’re not crazy and also you’re not too old. Although the web has been churning out increasingly rapid trend cycles for years, their lifespan has been shrinking alongside our attention spans. Trends that may have otherwise lasted for years at the moment are declared old news – and even worse, cheugy – inside days. The unsustainable pace of those trends could be mind-numbing for consumers, but they’re great for business, compelling consumers to never stop buying. It’s a marketing model that has thrived on TikTok – until now.

Shortly after beauty blogs first declared “blueberry milk nails” because the nail trend of the summer, TikTok users responded with incredulity and half-serious outrage. “We usually are not turning light blue into ‘blueberry milk,’” beauty and lifestyle influencer @katiehub.org jokingly shouted in a video. “I’m not actually mad, I’m just very dissatisfied.”

The milky-blue shade appeared to be a tipping point: we could get away with old money coastal granddaughter and maybe even clean girl, that girl, girl dinner. But could we get away with renaming something as banal as light blue into blueberry milk nails? Perhaps we’ve finally found the ceiling to TikTok’s micro-trends and the identities that associate with them.

It’s value noting that these trends rarely seem to come back off of our handheld screens and into the “real” world. There’s a growing disconnect between trends in online and offline spaces, while online micro-trends come and go so quickly that they outpace the power of individuals to maintain up offline.

Now, a lot of us construct our identities, consciously or not, out of the things we devour. You’re what you purchase. Our consumption habits have change into a signaling game, during which all the things we purchase is supposed to say something about who we’re – or who we hope to be. Starter pack memes and their variations have existed for years, dating back to the Polyvore style boards of the early 2010s. But their prevalence in modern web culture reveals just how closely tied our identities are to the patron goods we purchase. Within the comment section of a TikTok variation of a starter pack meme, featuring a collage of Lululemon fanny packs, Trader Joe’s seaweed snacks, Maison Margiela Replica perfume, and grape-flavoured Olipop, a user states simply: “i’m so unoriginal.” As TikTok video essayist Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote in her Substack essay on “micro-individuality”, “everyone appears to be more obsessive about individuality and differentiation than ever before, while concurrently participating in some of the intoxicating lifestyle reproduction mechanisms in human history.” 

TikTok trend cycles try to stay on the leading edge of uniqueness, while flattening all types of individuality right into a fastidiously chosen collection of Amazon Storefront-shoppable products that formulate a “-core” or “girl” (sure to find yourself flooding Goodwill donation bins and landfills inside a yr). As life under capitalism feels increasingly alienated and social institutions are in continuous decline, these trends feel like a confused try and reconcile individualism with a desperate need for community.

Once we see parts of ourselves reflected in consumer goods that others online also discover with, it could actually feel like a stand-in for community without sacrificing our desire for individualism. We’re a part of an in-group (“the women that get it, get it, and the women that don’t, don’t”) that’s inclusive enough for us to feel camaraderie with strangers who’ve the identical preferences for cream blush, but exclusive enough to signal status.

We are able to make a choice from being blueberry milk nails girls or tomato summer girls or latte make-up cozy soft life girls. But in point of fact, it is simply the illusion of alternative. They’re an aesthetic veneer to provide us a fleeting feeling of agency. If we will pick between glazed doughnut nails or blueberry milk nails, dark feminine energy or coquette ballet Sandy Liang x Baggu energy, we will assert some form of power over ourselves and the ways we’re perceived, even when only for a moment.

Capitalist society is invested in offering us these glimpses of alternative and naming them freedom, within the hopes that we are going to remain distracted enough not to understand that enormous parts of our lives are marked by what Marxist scholar David Harvey known as unfreedom. The experience of the working class is formed by a major degree of unfreedom. We spend most of our lives at jobs we keep to survive. From the moment we clock in, we give away all our freedom, spending most of our waking hours doing work that very rarely fulfils us, within the service of somebody who’s probably exploiting us.

Capitalist society convinces us that freedom is the liberty to devour, to choose from a stunning diversity of options (never mind that they’re all owned by the identical 4 corporations). Under capitalism, we’re continually reminded of our freedom to; the liberty to purchase, the liberty to do as you please, as long as you might have the cash to pay for it.

Yet for the overwhelming majority of staff, we are sometimes constrained by our lack of freedom from; freedom from losing our housing after rents are jacked as much as eye-watering rates, freedom from harassment at a job we will’t quit if we would like to pay our bills. Marx argued in Capital that the “realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is set by necessity and mundane considerations ceases”; in other words, where the realm of necessity is left behind.

Without democratic control over our workplaces there isn’t a freedom. There is simply the illusion of freedom offered to us in the shape of a series of fastidiously branded consumer goods with just-different-enough packaging. In a world that feels increasingly out of our control, these moments of consumer alternative offer transient refuge. Don’t get me incorrect, I still find myself influenced by TikTok trends, still find myself drawn to the olive oil bottle with the lovable graphic design, still get a rush of dopamine each time a latest package shows up on my doorstep. But a freer world is one we’ll must organise and fight for, irrespective of what color nail polish we wear while doing it.

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