I Don’t Want to Be “Soft Life” or “Girlboss”

When did being an ordinary person become a failure?

Last month, I watched a girl on TikTok cry because her “soft life” wasn’t soft enough.

She was sitting in a spotless beige apartment, latte in a glass mug, lashes done, silk robe, and she was sobbing because she still had to answer emails for her remote job.

I don’t say that to mock her. I say it because I saw myself in that breakdown.

Not in the silk robe, but in the quiet panic underneath the performance.

Because somewhere along the way, being a regular person with a regular job and a regular life stopped being enough.

You’re either building an empire or romanticizing rest for the camera.

And I’m tired.

Not burnout, not a nervous breakdown.

Just a bone-deep tired that comes from trying to turn my whole existence into a brand.

I don’t want a “soft life.”

I don’t want to be a “girlboss.”

I want a life that doesn’t need an aesthetic or a slogan.

I want a regular damn life.

The pressure to pick a side: burnout or beige luxury

It feels like womanhood right now is a two-option menu.

Option one: “Girlboss.”

Wake up at 5 a.m., drink something green, have 17 income streams, call every task “building my empire,” and treat rest like a business expense.

Option two: “Soft life.”

Drown your feed in candles, stay in hotel lobbies for the vibes, hold wine glasses like props, and talk about “main character energy” while quietly praying your rent payment goes through.

Both options look different, but they’re powered by the same engine: performance.

You’re not allowed to just live. You have to live for the feed.

I tried the girlboss thing first.

I bought the productivity planner with the gold coil.

I color-coded my Google Calendar until it looked like a bag of Skittles.

I listened to podcasts at 1.5x speed about “optimizing your morning.”

I genuinely believed I could time-block my way into happiness.

Instead, I time-blocked my way into crying in my car on my lunch break, putting concealer under my eyes in the rearview mirror so I could go back inside looking “fine.”

Then, when that predictably broke me, I swung hard in the other direction.

I tried on the soft life.

Bath bombs.

Journaling prompts about alignment.

Photos of my coffee with the word “romanticize” in the caption like a spell I was trying to cast on myself.

And yet, under the fluffy robe and the affirmations, I was still the same person panicking about debt, replying to Slack messages, wondering what the hell I was doing with my life.

Neither persona cured the ache.

Because the ache wasn’t about how I was living.

It was about who I was living for.

The quiet shame of wanting less

There is a special kind of shame reserved for people who say, out loud, “I just want an average life.”

Watch what happens when you tell someone you don’t want to be rich, famous, or influential.

Their eyebrows do this little jump like you’ve confessed to a crime.

I remember telling a friend, “Honestly, I’d be happy with a small apartment, a stable job, evenings free, maybe a dog someday. That’s it.”

She looked at me like I’d thrown away a winning lottery ticket.

“You’re settling,” she said. “Where’s your drive?”

Here’s the thing:

I have drive.

I just don’t want to drive myself into the ground.

I don’t dream of managing a team of 50 or scaling a startup or becoming an “it girl” of anything.

I dream of:

Having a job where I don’t dread Mondays.

Being able to take a sick day without calculating lost wages in my head.

Grocery shopping without checking my bank app in the pasta aisle.

Having friendships that exist in real life, not just comment sections.

None of that fits cleanly under a neon sign.

“Regular” is a hard sell.

There’s no trending sound for “I went to work, came home, made dinner, watched something dumb, went to bed before midnight, and it felt…peaceful.”

So we learn to feel embarrassed by our own contentment.

We apologize for not wanting more, even when “more” is killing us.

How girlboss culture and soft life content twist the same knife

On the surface, girlboss and soft life look like opposites.

One is hustle, one is ease.

One screams, the other whispers.

But they both carry the same ugly subtext:

Who you are right now is not enough.

Girlboss culture says:

“If you’re not monetizing it, maximizing it, or scaling it, you’re wasting it.”

Your hobbies should have Etsy shops.

Your downtime should be “invested” into learning skills.

Soft life culture says:

“If your life doesn’t look gentle and curated, if it has clutter or chaos or cheap furniture, you’re failing at femininity.”

Your suffering is only allowed if it’s aesthetically pleasing.

Both tell you:

Change.

Improve.

Polish.

Become a version of yourself that photographs well.

I caught myself doing it one day in the most mundane way.

I was making instant ramen.

My real life: throwing the square noodle block into a scratched pot while scrolling my phone, hair in a mess, dish towel over my shoulder.

My brain’s suggestion:

“Wait, what if you put it in the pretty ceramic bowl, added a boiled egg, some green onions, and filmed it overhead? You could post it as a ‘cozy night in’ video.”

Why?

Because somewhere along the way, I learned that even eating alone in my kitchen is supposed to be content.

This is the part that scares me:

We’re not just curating what we show.

We’re reshaping how we live so it looks better shown.

It’s not about girlboss or soft life.

It’s about the constant demand to perform a persona.

And guess who profits.

Influencer culture.

Productivity gurus.

Lifestyle brands with you on a subscription.

The one thing they cannot sell you is “regular.”

So they teach you to despise it.

The cost of being a brand instead of a person

Being a person is messy.

Being a brand is consistent.

Brands have color palettes and taglines and clear values.

People have bad days, contradictions, phases, and weird grocery lists.

When you’re living like a brand, everything has to make sense.

Your outfit matches your feed.

Your “career story” has a sexy arc.

Your struggles are inspirational but not too off-putting.

It feels powerful, at first.

You get clarity. Aesthetic direction. A niche.

Then one day you wake up and realize you’ve trapped yourself in a character that doesn’t let you breathe.

I know because I’ve done it more than once.

I tried the “hyper-ambitious career woman” era.

Then the “soft healing girl” era.

Then the “nonchalant cool girl who doesn’t care about anything” era, which was definitely the most exhausting of all.

Every time I changed, I announced it. I rebranded. I cleaned my feed.

I thought reinvention was freedom.

But real freedom would’ve been not needing a brand at all.

Here’s the actual cost that showed up in my life:

I ignored my body’s cues because “I’m not tired, I’m just not disciplined enough.”

I took on extra projects for the story of it, not the money or the joy.

I said yes to social plans I didn’t want because the vibe matched my current persona.

I felt like a fraud when I had a bad week, because my aesthetic was “glowing and thriving.”

You can’t heal in a role.

You can’t rest in a brand.

A regular life, with no tagline, gives you something these curated archetypes never will: room to be inconsistent, boring, complicated, and still worthy.

What a “regular damn life” means to me

When I say I want a regular life, people hear “mediocre.”

That’s not what I mean.

Mediocre is numb.

Regular, to me, is grounded.

A regular life, in my head, looks like this:

Work that pays enough to live and doesn’t swallow my identity whole.

A schedule that has blank spaces in it on purpose.

Relationships that don’t require me to constantly prove my value.

A home that’s clean enough, not Instagram-clean.

Time for hobbies that never make a cent and never need to.

It’s not anti-ambition.

If something lights me up and becomes a big deal, fine.

But the goal isn’t “big.” The goal is “true.”

Some days a regular life for me is walking to the grocery store, buying flowers just because, and coming home to cook while a podcast plays.

Other days it’s three loads of laundry, leftovers, scrolling on the couch, and going to bed at 10.

No lesson. No content. No aesthetic.

Just living.

The funny thing is, when you allow yourself that, nothing looks small anymore.

Suddenly answering an email kindly, or making a co-worker laugh, or washing your face at night feels like part of a whole life, not a filler scene between achievements.

The regular becomes sacred.

Not because you turned it into a morning routine graphic, but because you let yourself actually be there for it.

The courage to be unremarkable in public

What nobody says out loud is that wanting a regular life takes a strange kind of courage.

It’s easy to say, “I’m going to be huge.”

People recognize that script. They clap for it.

It’s harder to say, “I’m fine being a background character in the story of the world, as long as my own story feels honest.”

We’re terrified of being forgettable.

So we overcompensate.

We scream our specialness online.

We curate uniqueness like a collection.

We insist our lives are cinematic, even when our days feel like grocery lists and Google Docs.

But here’s a secret no algorithm will tell you:

You can be deeply fulfilled, wildly loved, and fully alive without being impressive to strangers.

You can be the most important person in your small circle and a complete nobody in the global feed—and that can be enough.

What if the point isn’t to leave a mark on the world, but to touch the few worlds that actually touch you back?

When I picture the end of my life, I don’t see headlines or viral posts.

I see people at a table telling stories like, “Remember when she always made too much pasta?” or “She always picked up the phone” or “She showed up.”

That’s a regular life.

And it feels like relief.

Choosing a life that doesn’t need a label

I’m not saying you can’t enjoy productivity or softness.

You can chase career goals and also love candlelit baths.

You don’t need to exorcise every aesthetic from your life.

What I’m questioning is the need to choose an identity and live inside it.

I want something messier and smaller and more human than a lifestyle.

I want a life.

A life where:

I can have an ambitious season without calling it a grindset.

I can have a gentle season without calling it soft life.

I can change my mind without announcing a rebrand.

I want mornings that don’t need filming.

Afternoons that are allowed to be dull.

Evenings that don’t have a moral, lesson, or hook.

I want to stop translating my existence into content and let it be what it is: fleeting, ordinary, mine.

If you feel that tug—the one that whispers, “What if this is enough?”—you’re not lazy.

You’re not unmotivated.

You’re waking up.

You’re remembering that you were never meant to be a slogan.

You’re allowed to want a regular damn life.

Not as a consolation prize.

As the point.