Photo Courtesy of Kawthar Ebrahim
How the pressure to aestheticize and curate has turned simple leisure into a high-stakes performance.
By Kawthar Ebrahim
TAMPA, Fla. — Pick up a sketchbook, learn an instrument, or try a new craft, and it will not be long before someone asks the inevitable question: “Why don’t you post your work on TikTok or Instagram?”
The truth is, the “casual hobby” is slowly disappearing for college students. Modern hustle culture’s demand for productivity, paired with social media’s demand for aesthetics, has turned what used to be an outlet for creative exploration and pastime into chores and monetized content.
Students have now lost their ability to do things simply for the joy of exploring new hobbies, even if they were bad at them, due to the competitive job market and their exposure to hyper-curated TikTok feeds. Hobbies are no longer an escape from academic stress but an obligation, a resume filler, or content to be produced.
Look around campus, and experience the shift yourself. Leisure activities are rarely allowed to stay private and personal. Someone’s love for thrifting is sometimes rebranded into a Depop side-hustle. A love for fitness becomes a lifestyle with color-coordinated gym sets and daily progress vlogs on social media. Even reading — which was once the ultimate escape from reality — has turned into “BookTok.” Making reading an aesthetic rather than an outlet for imaginative escapes.
College students today exist under constant economic and social pressure. With the cost of living rising and entry-level job requirements growing, students are conditioned to believe that time is money.
Treating daily habits more like branded aesthetics rather than personal experiences forces students to evaluate their creative interests like assets being maximized and shown off. Once those interests do not produce the intended outcome, personal guilt kicks in, phrasing time spent on hobbies as wasted.
Financial drive and personal loss from turning life into an aesthetic both lead to alienation. Treating hobbies as a performance trades personal satisfaction for external validation. This leads to students not being fully present in reading their book, working out, painting, or whatever interests them, because part of them is already thinking about ways they would share this experience either on social media or with someone else.
They stop painting because they enjoy producing visual representations of their ideas, and start doing it to achieve a specific “artistic” lifestyle aesthetic. The moment a hobby becomes about how it looks to an audience rather than how it feels to the creator, its value starts to vanish completely.
It becomes hard to distinguish between what you genuinely enjoy doing and what you enjoy being seen doing. Social gatherings and personal milestones turn into backdrops for content rather than simple, unscripted human interactions.
The freedom to be a beginner — to make ugly art, play the guitar off-tune, or try a sport without knowing you would be good at it — is an important part of personal growth. College is supposed to be the place where students discover themselves, not display their personal brand.
It is time to reclaim the unaesthetic life. Pick up something new this semester, keep it completely offline, do not turn it into a side hustle — if you do not want to — and allow yourself to be unproductively mediocre at it.