#Core-Core and living inside an aesthetic
Who am I when I strip away the visual curation of my life? Who am I with it?
“One day you’re going to look around and realize everyone loves you, but nobody likes you” comes from the mouth of Bojack horseman. The video in which he appears is darker, filtered through dreariness. Or a shuffle of clips across the screen. A replication of your for you page as the hours leave you accompanied by a loud beep. WAKE UP in bold letters followed by a clip from Wall-E. A slow zoom into the thick of evergreen. A clipping from a Robbin Williams movie that feels oddly hopeful yet bleak. This sequence of clips can be found in any TikTok video under #corecore, in an effort to show the bleakness, hopefulness, positivity etc in life.
So what is corecore meant to do? It feels like corecore has fashioned itself into some kind of nichetok matrix. These videos, which call attention to our constant escapism, doom scrolling, and widespread sadness are looking to alert us to the dystopia that is our lives. Red pill, blue pill shit. By choosing awareness of the difficult truths in life, there is hope on the other side. At least this is what corecore seems to think.
What is interesting about corecore to me is it’s use of the suffix -core. Everyone has heard of #cottagecore. Similarly there is #softcore, #emocore etc. Adding core to another word on the internet is typically meant to describe a genre of aesthetics. Corecore uses this ironically. Core doesn’t actually point to a genre of aesthetics. You won’t immediately be allerted to what this genre is in a way you immediately know what cottagecore probably looks like. The tendency for core core to point towards our general problem with escaping to the virtual world via aesthetic social identity.
Living inside an aesthetic or a niche is something we have all began to do naturally. Classifying and rebranding ourselves seems to have become the new form of self discovery and familiarity. It’s become commonplace to align ourselves with people and things that we feel share a similar look that we have or want to achieve. In high school I definitely felt like a different kind of person because I got my fashion inspiration from Pinterest posts under #tumblr and #hipster, and I aligned myself with people who dressed and adopted aesthetics similarly to me (Such as people who had themed instagram feeds). This is why the internet, specifically TikTok has been separated into so many niches that are purely visual. There are #aesthetic vloggers whose lives just happen to look clean, colorful, minimalist, HD and a host of other adjectives that don’t appear if most of us just film our daily lives. There’s fashion/lifestyle niches, #emocore, #Blackluxury and the list goes on.
So many blueprints to how to make our lives look a certain way, what to buy, how to dress etc. This is especially interesting when thinking about lifestyle content on the internet, because it is often almost purely about the visual aspects of life, the bags you buy, the apartment and so little about the way you choose to live, find fulfillment etc outside of consuming. Or it’s some form of aesthetically pleasing escapism from working culture that is also informed by a large amount of wealth that most do not have access to. Of course there is self improvement content on the internet, but even that seems to live in an aesthetic bubble of clean lines, perfect camera quality and visual put-togetherness. There are so few examples of popular media that focus on changing as a person that do not communicate some kind of inherent aesthetic value. After all, it is easier to adhere to a certain aesthetic rather that’s the way we dress or decorate our lives than it is to actually make changes to who we are, what we do and ultimately the way that we live.
As I tumble through my twenties with little idea of what I am doing, what’s going on and who I am, I am realizing how much of my identity is superficial. The way that I look is important to me. I like fashion, I like decorating, these are big parts of who I am. With each cute little treat I buy for myself or my home, I imagine my grandma’s drawer full of jewelry. Her thick, embossed curtains, the large china cabinet full of glasses I’d some day break. Her life was an act of adorning, and it is an important act. To make the difficult world into something that reflects you, your tastes, what you believe to be beautiful, touching and exciting is a powerful thing. It is second nature to so many of us. But the way you adorn your world can not substitute identity, regardless of how much it means to us, so many of our aesthetics are superficial. When the apartment is perfectly decorated, and my closet gets hard to shut how else is my existence expressed. Who am I when I strip away the visual curation of my life? Who am I with it?
It’s an easy question to ignore. When I am desperate for some kind of change I reach for the material world. I think many of us do. There have been times where I felt bored with life. Usually during these times I am avoiding doing the things that fulfill me. Passion can be a frightening thing when you grow up believing that your success, identity and livelihood are tied to it. Hobbies in our capitalist society are heavy with the weight of possible monetization. Starting a new skill can mean being bad at something, and adding another thing to the list of things I have tried and failed at ( Example: sewing machine I bought during lockdown. I tried to hem a pair of jeans, broke all the needles and never touched it again.) So, instead of reaching for the pile of craft supplies I lock up in my cabinet or writing poems in my empty notebook I dye my hair. I scour Pinterest for fashion inspo and dream up a new closet. I get a tattoo. A piercing. I think of the kind of person I want to look like and I can become that person so quickly. I can feel new, and the world around me can bend ever so slightly. But after i’ve adopted some new look, or redecorated my apartment I am left with the same Arieon, and nothing has really changed.
At my big age, I am having to relearn that what I look like is not what I am. Fashion, aesthetics, and adornment are important. We live in a visual world and there are wonderful ways to communicate our interests via the visual. But as I record aesthetically pleasing Tik Toks, capturing only the pretty things, and I buy clothes and change my hair and try to fit into a way of being that looks right to me— I am also thinking more about what feels right. So much of being young is grasping whatever we can to make something that belongs to us. Maybe the visual is the easiest thing to control. Maybe the urge to make everything look a certain way is more of an urge to escape the ugliness and chaos of the world. Either way, I am trying to spend more time being Arieon instead figuring out what Arieon looks like. I don’t know if anyone was trying to say all this with a sad video of Bojack Horseman, but I do know that it is a nice feeling to step outside of our collective curation sometimes.