Deep Thoughts on Superficial Matters

Hey honeys and hustlers,

Somewhere along the way, “aesthetic” became synonymous with “performative.” As if the moment something is pleasing to look at—cohesive, intentional, soft in the right places, glossy in the right lighting—it must be trying too hard. As if beauty is always a cover for insecurity, always a bid for attention, always a lie. But that assumption doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from how we’ve been trained to read femininity.

In our culture, femininity is a practice of frivolity. Femininity is the extra. It’s the frosting, the fluff, the thing you could live without if you were serious. And because femininity has been treated as ornamental, anything it touches gets treated the same: nail art becomes frivolous, styling becomes vanity, a curated film set becomes commercial, and a beautiful workspace becomes something meant for pretty photos on Instagram rather than a functional necessity. The problem is that a lot of what we dismiss as “just for the aesthetic” is actually function at its highest level—function that respects the human being using it. There’s a reason a thoughtfully organized desk makes it easier to work. There’s a reason a well-lit YouTube setup holds attention and communicates credibility. There’s a reason a product that feels good in the hand, a website that guides you without friction, or a room that calms your nervous system can change what you believe you’re capable of doing.

Beauty isn’t always decoration. Often, beauty is interface.

When people call a beautiful setup “performative,” what they’re really saying is: I’ve decided the labor that produced this doesn’t make it better than the content or media I produce in the bare-bones setup that I put no effort or energy into. And if it doesn’t make it better, it doesn’t deserve respect. It certainly doesn’t deserve money. We’ll consume the outcomes of aesthetic labor nonstop, but we’ll refuse to dignify the work it takes to create them.

Because aesthetic labor is labor—time, taste, experimentation, materials, maintenance, learning curves, the invisible hours. Someone had to test the camera angles. Someone had to learn how light behaves on different skin tones. Someone had to figure out how to make the background clean without making it sterile. Someone had to choose the chair that won’t wreck their posture after three edits. Someone had to decide what not to include. Someone had to make it look effortless, which is a special kind of effort. And that effort is rarely neutral. A lot of it is gendered.

The choices most associated with femininity—color coordination, visual harmony, sensory pleasure, softness, adornment, ambiance—are also the choices we’ve been taught to trivialize. Not because they don’t matter, but because the people who are expected to master them have historically been undervalued. If the work is “women’s work,” if it’s coded feminine, we pretend it’s instinct instead of skill. We call it taste, like taste is something you’re born with, not something you build through healthy consumption and practice.

That’s why the same eye for detail can be celebrated in one context and mocked in another. A designer who obsesses over kerning is a perfectionist; a person who obsesses over their hair is shallow. A founder who sweats the packaging is visionary; a creator who sweats the vibe is attention-seeking. A beautifully engineered chair is “design”; a beautifully styled corner is “aesthetic.” But the line between “design” and “aesthetic” is mostly a story we tell.

Good design is function that has been cared for. It’s utility, yes—but it’s also empathy. It’s asking, “How will this feel to live with?” It’s anticipating friction. It’s honoring the fact that humans are not robots, and we do not interact with the world purely through efficiency. We are moved by color. We are soothed by symmetry. We are persuaded by clarity. We remember what delights us.

So when a creator builds a clean, beautiful YouTube setup, that is not automatically an act of deception. It can be craft. It can be communication. It can be respect for the audience. It can be respect for the work. It can be a small insistence—daily, material, visible—that what they’re making deserves a real container. And if your first instinct is to call that “performative,” it’s worth asking: performative to whom? For what? What exactly is being “performed” when someone improves the environment around their work? Sometimes the accusation of performance is just discomfort dressed up as critique. It’s the uneasy feeling that someone else’s standard makes your own lack of effort visible. It’s easier to sneer than to admit you’re seeing the gap between what’s possible and what you’ve settled for.

Maybe it’s not performative. Maybe you’re just being outdone.

And if you’re being outdone, the answer isn’t to diminish the work. The answer is to recognize it. Because this is what we do when we devalue feminine-coded labor: we turn skill into “extra,” we turn care into “trying,” and we turn excellence into something suspicious. Then we wonder why the people doing that work burn out, undercharge, and feel embarrassed to ask for more (and potentially stop altogether). Paying people well for aesthetic labor isn’t indulgence—it’s accuracy. It’s naming the value correctly.

Taste is not an accessory; it’s a language. It’s how we communicate belonging, politics, subculture, aspiration, and identity. It’s how we make meaning out of the everyday. And when taste is applied with intention—when it’s translated into space, image, product, or experience—it shapes culture. We can keep pretending it’s “not that deep,” but the consequences say otherwise. Entire industries are built on superficial qualities. Entire careers hinge on what we look like when we show up to work, rather than the quality of the work itself. Entire standards of “professionalism” are quietly enforced through dress, while we simultaneously shame the people who put in the time to dress well.

What would change if we stopped treating beauty as a guilty pleasure and started treating it as a legitimate contribution? What would change if we understood that the most pleasing things are often the most functional—not because they’re pretty, but because they were designed with a human in mind? And what would change if we stopped acting like femininity makes something less serious, less intelligent, less worthy?

Maybe then we’d be able to see the truth hiding in plain sight: A beautiful workspace isn’t just a flex. It’s infrastructure. A well-crafted set isn’t just content. It’s production. And the people who build these experiences—designers, stylists, creators, organizers, artists, technicians—aren’t performing. They’re working. And they should be valued like it.