Can I “live my best life” without turning into a nobhead?

I spent about three hours today looking up articles about “the perfect capsule wardrobe”. It’s something I’ve looked up approximately a hundred times before, and yet as of right now, I do not have a capsule wardrobe.

What I have is probably closer to a post-apocalyptic floordrobe, by which I mean “I’ve had a migraine for almost a week straight, so I haven’t put away any of my or my partner’s clothes and we’ve both been trying to find clean pants in the pile so it’s all everywhere and it’s looking like an overwhelming task to put right”, and that’s usually a sign I’m about to go online and look up articles about capsule wardrobes.

I’m not a particularly tidy person. Neither is my partner. As you can imagine, I often wonder if my life would be improved by owning less STUFF, except the problem with that is, I happen to like all my STUFF. I can get emotionally attached to a pair of socks.

Anyway, the problem with the capsule wardrobe articles is that they all say I need to own a striped Breton t-shirt and something called a ‘classic mac’, and respectfully, I disagree. Maybe one day I’ll find an article that tells me the perfect pieces include a battered Alkaline Trio t-shirt and three vintage Berkertex dresses I got from Oxfam in 2015 that I never have any call to wear. Until then, I might have to put up with the floordrobe.

I mean, I would love to be the kind of woman who wears artisanal French t-shirts and sharply-tailored cigarette pants. Or like, sometimes I would love to be that kind of woman. Unfortunately, I went to work yesterday in a dress covered in dinosaurs, with matching T-Rex earrings and all my tattoos on show, and as it happens I love being that kind of woman more.

I was having a conversation with my boss this week about the homogenisation of culture, and because he’s very patient with me, he didn’t tell me to stop procrastinating and do some actual work. Instead he told me that a couple of years ago he was at a pub and saw the young man from YouTube who tailors his own Edwardian-inspired wardrobe and exclusively wears that every day. As far as I’m concerned, well done that lad: we need more of that in the world. Idiosyncratics. Eccentrics. Dare I say… weirdoes. And not just in fashion! In a world being stripped for parts by tech oligarchs in search of humanity at its most mollified and subservient core, I cannot personally see the value in staid conformity. That man and his hand-sewn cravats is, to me, the epitome of cool, rebellious, punk spirit, and so are the stop motion animators clinging to their frame-by-frame workflows. So are the people performing in folk choirs, and learning to code pixel art for their SDV-inspired video games, and photocopying increasingly bad quality zines they cut and paste together in their bedrooms.

On a note that will no doubt feel like a tangent but I swear has relevance, I recently got back into fragrance, because naturally when I have a pile of writing I want to do, there’s a deeply unhelpful part of my brain that insists I take up another wildly expensive and time-consuming hobby.

Obviously perfume collecting can quickly become an even more expensive hobby than my usual fibre crafts, so I’ve been watching a LOT of review content before sending off for 1ml samples of the things I want to try, and that means I’m reading a lot of Reddit threads, and watching even more YouTube and TikTok than usual, which means no, you’re not allowed to check my average weekly screentime.

It also means though that I’m being exposed to a massive amount of pretentious nobheadery of the highest order. Like, have you ever seen a thread of perfume reviews on Fragrantica? The first one will say something like, “this feels like an expensive woman wearing a Chanel pencil skirt, but she’s got it hiked up over her silk stockings in the back of a cinema while her lover comes back from the concession stand with a Tango Ice Blast and a rose between his teeth.”

And then the very next one will just say, “Smells like the inside of my nan’s handbag.”

And I can’t tell which of those styles of review I dislike more, tbh. Mostly they just make me giggle.

What is it though about anything to do with ‘lifestyle content’ making people go slightly wrong? Because I’m not being funny, I bought a 2ml sample of that perfume and I didn’t get any of that; to me it smelled a bit sweet and musky, and it disappeared off my skin in three minutes flat. I suppose that doesn’t feel quite as -iconique- to type out on your lunch break.

I’ve also been known to look up articles about ‘living a slow life,’ despite the fact I probably live the slowest life of anyone I know already, so unless I find a long-forgotten blog authored by a Galapagos tortoise I’m not sure what insights I’m expecting to get.

My obsession with reading about how other people have achieved all of their delicious lives is, I understand, far from unique. Do we do it because we want to be told how to get it right, somehow? Do we think these shiny-haired influencers have managed to unlock some sort of secret to life we mere mortals have overlooked, all this time?

Well, if they have, I often come away from the blogs and Substacks and how-to-guides with the unfortunate sensation that the secret of a flawless life is to be entirely fucking insufferable. You know, develop a 26-step skincare routine that I do twice a day without fail. Get up at 3am to put my hair up in heatless curlers. (For reference, it’s currently 3am now and I haven’t actually been to sleep yet; too busy watching YouTube.) Wear my cigarette trousers and my Breton t-shirt and, I don’t know, probably Baccarat Rouge 540, or whatever’s currently the most popular one. Because if the internet is to be believed, to live my best life, I should be living the same life as everyone else.

And I don’t think I know how to do that.

Which is not, of course, to suggest that I am somehow immune from becoming a nobhead myself. Frankly, I suspect I’ve been a nobhead longer than anyone, it’s just that I think my personal brand of nobheadery is at least vaguely memorable, even if it’s not always for the right reasons.

I’m trying to come to terms with not having a tidily curated like, in much the same way I’m trying to come to terms with occasionally struggling to keep on top of my housework. Who gives a shit, really, when I've got books to read and stories to write and a friends/family/my boyfriend to annoy?

I think what it comes down to for me is that I use those articles as a means of beating myself up for not already living my best, most flawless and glamorous and effortless life, and it’s a wild example of cognitive dissonance because I don’t want to make myself small, or palatable, like that. There’s just a weird, mean part of myself that thinks I should want that. Or that I should do it anyway, and learn to like it.

Except that wouldn’t be me living my best life, would it? I’d still be me. I’d still be a nobhead. I’d just be poorer and less happy and insecure that someone would notice I don’t fit in the way I’m pretending to.

So, big sigh, I suppose I’ll just carry on being the kind of dinosaur-clad nobhead who doesn’t fit in I’ve always been. And I absolutely promise not to buy a stripy t-shirt while I’m at it.