Whimsy-maxxing Has Nothing to Do With How Colorful Your Life Is

As ridiculous as this sounds, I’ve found lately that my joy for life inevitably digresses into a gnawing anxiety that I am not living it deeply enough. It's almost because I see such a capacity for adventure, expression and love that I worry I don’t really do it justice. I find joy in buying pretty dresses and then stress that I don't wear. I love to read but I worry that I don't read enough. The stack on my bedside table is more ominous than it is exciting. I want to create a journaling routine, but my handwriting is messy. I'm inconsistent. I don't have anything good enough to say.

Even the things that bring me joy, somehow, have found ways to torture me. And while I've been searching for some reason why, I've been thinking a lot about the concept of, and the recent trend of whimsy, which really in a nutshell is joy itself. Could that be the answer to my overthinking?

Scrolling through my explore page, it seems that whimsy refers to anything colorful, small, cute and quirky that sparks joy and reminds us of our childhood: the bright clothes, VHS tapes, magazines and toys that we associate with imagination and happiness. Whimsy-maxxing, as it's called on social media, is about adding color or character to things that provide absolutely no function to your life. I think of the rainbow star sprinkles in a seed shaker that creators add to their daily matchas. It's often something small, like a trinket or Calico Critter that sits on your window sill and does nothing but look cute. I've seen creators bedazzling a tube of toothpaste, gluing buttons to picture frames, and tying bows on anything that would allow it.

But it's not just nostalgia for our childhood fueling the “whimsy-maxxing” movement. For the past 20 years we have sat front row and witnessed the character and color of our lives fall away.

The opposite of whimsical aesthetic, modern design is defined by clean lines, minimalism and functionality. In the sense that time continues to move on, the visuals of our lives have always been “modernizing” themselves. It makes sense then, that when modern design came into the cultural zeitgeist it was quickly adopted as the "correct" one. We had finally arrived at the "core" of design, somehow more true for its simplicity.

In terms of public design, the modern style was thought to be the Switzerland of aesthetics, neutral for the purpose of disappearing into the background of public space. Buildings lost their crown molding and intricate wood doors, lamp posts changed from glossy black iron monuments to metal poles. Modern interiors are the norm, as well, although some creators are posting about their rehabilitation from "millennial beige." Landlords boarded up fireplaces and alcoves, replaced real wood floors with linoleum, and covered colorful tile with white. Our clothes and makeup, the pinnacle of individual expression, have been dominated by "clean-girl" trends. Now, the perfect white tank top might be more in demand than any handcrafted Italian leather boots. Even our magazines and movies are less colorfull. People decry the “Netflix movie” aesthetic for its lack of warmth and depth. Vintage Teen Vogues make the rounds on social media as a relic of the time when media was quirky and fun.

So why would we willingly de-whimsify our lives? Is it really just because we love simplicty? The truth is that character means detail which means craft. Beadwork, woodwork, metal work, tailoring, lighting, graphic design, these are specialized skills required to imbue a society with character. Without them, your production becomes cheaper and easier to scale. Maybe we as a society didn't choose the modern design because we liked it, maybe it was just cheaper for corporations to produce for us.

In theory, the color and spontanaeity of whimsy stands in direct opposition to this kind of uniformity and optimization. Whimsy is about something that cannot be simplified for mass consumption or reduced to a repeatable aesthetic, or optimized. But while researching for this essay, I turned my explore page into whimsy-maxxing galore. I noticed that the more I scrolled, the more matcha with rainbow sprinkles I saw. I found the same how-tos, craft ideas, and inspiration photo dumps over and over again. That familiar feeling crept in. I found myself worrying about not being able to "do" whimsy-maxxing right. What if my junk journal spread looks ugly? Can I afford that much ribbon? What if I don't want to wear pink?!

If, through the past 20 years of "de-whimsification," society has already proven to us that it values reproducibility and maximum profit over character, I wonder how that has impacted social media. Over the past 10 years, content creation has shifted from simply sharing photos of your life with your friends to “trending formats.” Everyone is adapting trends to fit their "niche." Camera angles, poses, even the color of your text on screen, it all evolves uniformly. It’s not sharing anymore, it’s content: reproducible formats designed for maximum viewership, just like our architecture, clothing, movies and decor.

The sad thing is that the greatest strength of social media is its ability to absorb any kind of movement, even one as contradictory to uniformity as whimsy, and turn it into a trend. As it gains popularity on social media, whimsy-maxxing becomes yet another aesthetic that creators must perform in repetition of each other. Adaption in their day-to-day lives outside of social media, or examination of whimsy as an ethos, is then optional.

When I think of what whimsy-maxxing really means, it actually has nothing to do with how colorful your life is, or how many bows you've added to your toiletries. Whimsy is about spontaneity. At its core, it's more about the playfulness and imagination of our childhood than the aesthetic. It's the ability to stay present and connected to the world around us, to greet each moment with curiosity and love. Whimsy is about giving in to the whims of your heart. And yes that can mean buying silly little dolls and decorating your bedroom, but it also means skipping Pilates to go on a long walk because that's what you felt like doing. It's about sending your friend a long letter when they don't know it's coming or building a fort out of sheets for movie night. True whimsy can't be bought at Michaels, there are no supplies needed for it.

Maybe our obsession with uniformity and optimization started when the lamp-posts lost their character, but the final nail in the coffin was social media. Nothing else has so infected our pliable hopeful minds with the idea that everything we do must be perfect. It becomes so engrained in your psyche, it is no longer a strategy through which to gain followers. It is a lens through which you see the world and everything you do. It's why I couldn't just wear what I wanted to wear, why I couldn't just read at my own pace, or allow my journal to be messy and inconsistent. Why I couldn’t allow myself to be human.

As I finish this essay, it seems that the whimsy-maxxing trend has already begun to fall out of fashion, replaced with “kinda chic” as the phrase of the day. What I take with me, however, is the idea thatwhimsy-maxxing isn't about how colorful my life is. It's about allowing myself to be ugly, unconsumable and radically forgiving myself for the ways I'm not perfect.