Cozy Girl Lifestyle is a Rational Response to a Winner-Take-All Culture

parleys don't hit and followers don't accumulate, but hot chocolate never fails

via Pinterest

Yesterday my wife and I took our (somehow almost a year old 😭) baby to the Connecticut Flower & Garden Show, which is happening this weekend. It’s our third year in a row of attending. It’s just such a pleasant experience; you go and there’s big, crazy beautiful indoor garden arrangements, gorgeous flower displays put up for competition, rare plants, demonstrations of various planting and pruning techniques, all manner of vendors, reasonably-priced food, and beer and cocktails for sale that you can leisurely sip as you wander around the concourse. The only issue is that it’s become quite crowded. Asking around, our anecdotal impression was confirmed - more and more people have been attending the show, and the age of the audience has been trending down. Don’t get me wrong, the average attendee is still probably like 65 years old. But there’s definitely more young people showing up, and I’m pretty confident I know why: the Connecticut flower show is very cozy, so it’s attracting more and more cozy girls.

flower…

…and garden

I suspect most of you already understand the concept. The cozy girl online phenomenon is a lifestyle aesthetic, popularized on platforms like Pinterest and TikTok, that centers on softness, comfort, domestic rituals, and emotional self-soothing; think oversized sweaters, candles, journaling, and carefully curated quiet routines. Sometimes cozy girl influencers present retreat from hustle culture and competitive striving as a kind of gentle rebellion, often explicitly progressive, elevating small pleasures and controlled environments over ambition and public achievement. Often enough, though, with cozy girls the things themselves are the things themselves - the feeling of warm clean sheets fresh from the dryer, the taste of hot mulled cider, the feeling of peace when looking out the window onto a nighttime snowfall… this is the domain of the cozy girl.

I probably also don’t need to tell you that the cozy girl archetype is mocked as much as it’s celebrated and derided as some sort of reactionary movement as often as it’s seen as a progressive impulse. A lot of women love to be cozy girls and a lot of people, particularly other women, love to hate them.

There is a certain kind of person, usually self-styled as clear-eyed, hard-headed, and immune to trends, who regards the cozy girl lifestyle with undisguised contempt. She sees cozy culture as unserious, quiescent, and politically regressive. She insists that the things celebrated by cozy girls are so celebrated because they replicate the preferences of the wealthy, of the bourgieosie. Though white herself, the critic of cozy girls waves darkly in the direction of the “unbearable whiteness” of cozy girl culture. She scrolls past the candles and cardigans and carefully assembled charcuterie boards with a sneer: bread and circuses for women who should know better! In what she takes to be nostalgia for an imagined past, she sees social and cultural conservatism; in the preference for flannel and tea and log cabins, she sees an unforgivable Eurocentrism; in the hunt for momentary and replicable pleasures, she sees an embrace of the status quo. Some of these criticism have a little merit, but I find myself entirely unable to join in that contempt. In a winner-take-all society where ordinary life has been systematically stripped of dignity, the turn toward “cozy” is less a retreat from reality into the past and more a rational adaptation to the unhappy present.

You’ve heard this song from me before many times: we live in an era in which the range of lives publicly regarded as worthy of living has contracted almost to nothing. Our culture confers esteem on a vanishingly small number of roles, and those roles are largely defined by being visible - that is to say, by attracting public attention, of which there is a necessarily finite supply. Success, as it is marketed to young people, means being a pop star on the order of a Sabrina Carpenter, a director with the cultural cachet of a Greta Gerwig, or at minimum a micro-celebrity “creator” whose daily routines are packaged for the algorithm. A contented life requires building a brand, cultivating a following, being legible to the feed. Everything else - teacher! paralegal! office manager! dental hygienist! retail supervisor! random white collar office email job that’s basically fine! - is flattened into an undifferentiated gray. These are necessary roles, some of them pay well, but they certainly aren’t glamorous ones, and young Americans seem increasingly convinced that a life that doesn’t inspire envy among others - when broadcast online, naturally - isn’t one worth living.

I could write a book (and perhaps one day I will) about how noble criticism of American definitions of success curdled into a set of expectations that are, for most people, totally unachievable. The observation that identifying oneself with your profession, the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit critique from the 1950s and 60s, was perfectly correct; the string of 1990s movies that portrayed office life as drab and soul-crushing were reacting to something real. But we now live in a vacuum of meaning and a job market that lacks mass employment options that are widely seen as worthy of respect and envy. It’s an economy where agriculture hasn’t been a dominant source of jobs for a hundred years, where blue collar and industrial professions have collapsed as sources of middle class incomes, where the gig economy is economically brutal and notoriously harried, and where heading off to a cubicle farm every morning o push digital paper around all day is seen as a life not worth living. What, then, are the people to do with their lives?

For Gen Z, this has all combined with a frankly pathological embrace of high-risk, high-variance speculation into something I find very scary; it’s a generation that seems to view all ordinary jobs as sucker deals for “NPCs,” pushing them towards more and more risky efforts to make money and escape the life of drudgery they mostly haven’t lived but have been taught to disdain. “Gen Z” is the empty, meaningless signifier that we’ve chosen for them, but it would be more apt to call them Generation Roulette Wheel. They never stop looking for a get-rich-quick hustle. Cryptocurrency manias rise and fall with the chaos of a fever dream; meme stocks explode and crater in a matter of days; sports gambling apps turn every game into a financial instrument, every friendship into a wagering pool. When your ambient culture tells you that the only meaningful victories are stratospheric and rare, it makes a certain perverse sense to chase stratospheric and rare outcomes. If stability isn't honored, what's left other than volatility?

The downside appears to be obvious to everyone but young adults aged 18-30: the odds are terrible. 96% of online gamblers lose money. Most investors see a significant net loss from meme stocks, even when they aren’t explicit scams. Crypto is an almost entirely unregulated world absolutely filled to the brim with fraud and corruption. About half of “influencers” make less than $15,000 a year from their work, and the per-hour return is often terrible. YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and other “creator” platforms are Pareto distributed, with a tiny portion of users capturing a huge majority of the value. All of this means that the overwhelming majority of young people will not become famous musicians, viral influencers, or hedge fund prodigies. They’re not going to turn a Draftkings account into an empire or TikToks into generational wealth. They will, instead, eventually be forced to do ordinary work for ordinary pay, in a labor market that is increasingly precarious and a housing market that feels like a practical joke. (If they're lucky.) They will age. They will get tired. They will discover that their student loans are not impressed by their carefully curated personal brand. And the longer that they spend in the clutches of Parlay World, stacking more and more bets on top of each other for ever-lower odds of success, the more of a hole they’ll have to dig out of when they finally get serious and get a real job.

And this is where “cozy girl” enters, not as a surrender to convention but as a logical, wise choice. Because almost everyone who tries to get rich quick will fail, but everyone can choose to be cozy.

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The genius of the cozy aesthetic is that it identifies sources of pleasure that are widely accessible and modest and treats them as inherently worthy of serious cultivation: a soft sweater, a well-made cup of tea, a public library card, a crockpot recipe that reliably produces something warm and nourishing, a Saturday morning with nowhere to be. You may find any one or all of these more or less attractive based on your own preferences, but whatever they are, they’re not signifiers of elite achievement, they’re all available in low-cost forms, and they’re all reliable and attainable. They’re not blue-check credentials, they don’t require venture capital or viral reach, and you don’t need to chew your fingernails waiting for the wheel to spin to see if you’ve won them. These simple pleasures are, instead, elements of an ordinary life lived with intention.

In a society that has collapsed its respect for the ordinary, such an embrace of quiet and dependable comforts might be a quietly radical move. But, honestly, I like the least-politicized visions of cozy girl life the most. One of the virtues of the philosophy lies in its ability to just accept a thing for itself; you don’t have to write a dissertation on the loaded symbolic values of a pair of warm wool socks. The value lies in how they feel.

There was a time - unequally distributed, filled with its own kinds of hardships and limitations, no doubt subject to the depravations of racism and gender inequality, and frequently romanticized, but not entirely mythical - when the successful life was not assumed to be spectacular. You could work a stable job, raise children, tend a garden, join a bowling league, and be understood as having achieved something meaningful. That culture, such as it was, acknowledged that most human lives would be modest in scope and that this modesty was not a defect. That consensus has eroded, and I stress, for some good reasons: many people found this consensus stultifying rather than comforting, saw their ambitions crushed by those cramped definitions of success, were excluded from respect and flourishing because of their gender or race or sexual orientation, or were simply bored to tears. Many housewives saw these cultural cues as enslaving rather than emotionally satisfying. But we’re now in a place where ordinariness itself is seen as a kind of failure, and too many have absorbed the idea that only a mark accepts a normal life. And “the hustle” truly never ends; the narrative background noise insists that if you’re not optimizing, scaling, disrupting, and monetizing, you’re failing, leaving people exhausted and stressy.

The cozy girl rejects that premise. She recognizes the great human pleasure of achieving modest victories within modest ambitions. She understands that the aggregate of many tiny pleasures is considerable happiness. She does not (usually) pretend that her homemade soup is going to upend capitalism or insist that her carefully tended houseplants are a substitute for structural reform. What she does, instead, is lower the bar for a life that feels good to live, and in so doing, she makes happiness less hostage to the approval of strangers. In a digital world defined by our constant communicative proximity to each other, the sense of performing for others has become reflexive, constant. A lot of younger adults seem genuinely not to understand what it means to do something just to do it, rather than to be seen doing it. The fact that a cozy girl’s pleasures are not subject to the external review of her peers thus matters more than her critics are willing to admit. In a winner-take-all culture status is scarce by design. The structure is pyramidal: a few are lauded, some are mocked, most are ignored. When respect becomes positional, something you must seize from others rather than something broadly distributed, anxiety metastasizes. Everyone is competing for a spotlight that can only illuminate so many faces. The result is a generalized sense of insufficiency.

The cozy turn is an end run around that spotlight. The cozy girl says: I will not wait for the culture to recognize my life as meaningful. I will not measure my days against the highlight reels of people whose primary job is to be seen. I will instead treat the small, replicable pleasures available to me as worthy of pride.

Of course, there are criticisms one can make, and as I’ve suggested, they’ve been made many times. The “whiteness” critique is probably the most common, if also the most easily dismissed. A related phenomenon is “cottagecore,” which focuses more on the visual style of coziness than its experience, and cottagecore has been skewered just as relentlessly. You can imagine the terminology: white, sanitized, protofascist. I would simply say that this is an example of theory slop that has no point and no potential for victory; no one is going to stop liking looseleaf tea and a cat curled up on their lap because some take-slinging thinkpiece wrangler says they should. And these racialized critiques are easily undermined by the fact that many, many of the people who are most enthusiastic about cozy culture are people of color. (If you take the time to look, you’ll find that there are a lot of Black cozy girls.) I understand that it’s fraught business, calling particular identity-based critiques a matter of getting angry for the sake of getting angry, but here…. Is anyone really mad that some women like to share their love of terrycloth bathrobes and scented candles with each other online?

More biting are criticisms that point out that cozy girl aesthetics certainly are performed even as the pleasures themselves are extolled as being inherent or experienced; that’s why there are cozy girls who have millions of followers on the various platforms and networks, after all. But here again lies the beauty of the whole enterprise: however much any individual cozy influencer might violate the spirit of the thing in performing simple and direct pleasure, those pleasures remain direct and simple, and cozy girl audience is made up almost entirely of people who simply enjoy them. There’s no wing of influencer culture that isn’t cynical to some degree and inveterately obsessed with the opinions of others. But while you might never look like that hot girl influencer and never live in the Manhattan penthouse of that rich guy influencer, you can take a nice long soak in a bath with some fragrant epsom salts. And if we have to live in a world where most people are going to spend an inordinate amount of time looking at things they want on Instagram, I think it’s much healthier to look at cats, sweaters, and used books than at unobtainably attractive women, unfeasibly expensive cars, totally impractical vacations, or entirely unachievable lives.

Cozy girl culture is, like most modern cultures, fundamentally a variety of consumerism, though it is one with an admirably achievable version of consumer life. There is certainly a version of coziness that becomes another consumption treadmill - buy this candle, this throw blanket, this artisanal mug, until your life finally looks like the Pinterest board you’ve been promised! And there is definitely an approach to coziness that gets very expensive, very fast. Capitalism has an uncanny ability to commodify even our attempts to opt out. But this is not a unique indictment of coziness; it’s a feature of the system in which we are all entangled. And unlike expensive car culture or celebrity culture or extravagant travel culture, there are inexpensive versions of almost everything that cozy girl life has to offer, as well as a lot of cozy girl influencers who specialize in bringing an affordable version to the masses. You could do a lot worse.

The more interesting question is why the embrace of comfort and modest pleasure feels so threatening to some observers. There are an inordinate number of critics of cozy girl culture, and again a disproportionate and depressing majority of them are also women. I suspect this negativity persists because coziness exposes the brittleness of our prestige economy. If large numbers of young people decide that the good life can be found in the kitchen, on the couch, and in the quiet accumulation of small pleasures, then the cultural leverage of the spectacular diminishes. The demand for hyper-visibility weakens. The endless exhortation to court the envy of others begins to look faintly ridiculous.

It’s easy, from a certain vantage point, to sneer that coziness is politically inert. I would argue, though, that the insistence that only grand gestures count is itself politically unhelpful. When every meaningful act must be large, public, and transformative, ordinary people are by turns cursed to feeling impotent and relieved of their responsibility to do the best they can. They therefore wait for leaders, for movements, for enflamed moments, which are all important but not what most of politics is about. Meanwhile, their actual lives (where they will spend the overwhelming majority of their hours) go unexamined. Cozy girl culture, at its best, re-centers those hours. It says that the way you set up your living room, the care you take in preparing a meal, the gentleness with which you structure your downtime, all matters. Not because your life will be or should be endlessly photographed and shared, though many do, but because you will inhabit these spaces. And, again, there is the thing itself. I am part of a leftist lineage that stresses that even the most ardent revolutionaries put up with the political in order to earn a world where we don’t have to be political anymore. Emma Goldman did not quite say “If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution,” but that was indeed her belief, and she was right.

I shouldn’t conclude my exhortation of cozy culture with a consideration of abstract political virtues, though; the whole point is to remember the feeling of your favorite sweater on a chilly morning and the pleasure of sipping herbal tea before bed. I do think, though, that it behooves all of us - even those among us who, strangely, claim not to like being cozy - to remember that expectation is the thief of joy, and our culture tends to hang truly extravagant expectations all around us. The truth is that most of us are not going to win the lottery of cultural acclaim. We will not be the one-in-a-million breakout star. But we can, if we choose, design lives that feel good, good enough on a day-to-day basis. We can elevate the accessible and recognize it as the better part of life. We can decide that pleasure does not have to be exceptional to be real. If that attitude seems unserious, then unseriousness may be exactly what we need. In an culture that demands constant performance and a society that honors only the extraordinary, choosing to be cozy isn’t giving up. The cozy girl opts out of a rigged hierarchy and builds, quietly or not, a life that does not require applause to be worth living.