Soft Living Won't Save You
On the commodification of intimacy and the myth of optimized living
Have you ever heard of soft-clubbing? *Gunshot. An anvil falls on me, causing me to tumble down a cliff into a snake pit that catches on fire.*
I’m so sick of the armchair classes’ endless navel-gazing about what Gen Z likes (and doesn’t), how we fuck (or don’t), where we go out (or don’t), how we work (or don’t), who we date (or don’t), what we read (or don’t)... Like, man, I think it depends.
Soft-clubbing is the latest “Gen Z trend” in the propaganda war to paint our generation as a cucked, basic, boring, sexless, tenderqueer wasteland. According to The Cut, clubbing is “evolving into something less chaotic, more considered.” In practice, that means overproduced parties that look like baby showers, held in coffee shops, salons, saunas, and anywhere but a club venue (even as clubs need money now more than ever.) Sure, I guess it is soft – like a flaccid penis. Soft as in uninspiring, dour.
Sorry, my idea of a night out is not watching film noir followed by a close reading analysis by some white girl in a beret while we are served zero-proof tinctures. I want to be LIT and KI and GAB with my GIRLS. And maybe even smoke a cigarette or 10. IS THAT SO DIFFICULT?
Yes, I am being petty, but I’m earnestly worried about our generation’s trend toward dogmatic asceticism. Soft-clubbing is one microcosm of this broader aesthetic monoculture: green juice, tradwives, Pilates, ice baths, soft-clubbing, sex negativity, et al. And… to be clear, I live for green juice and girly workouts. But where are the disciples of Queen Gwyneth? Can we not have our tofu and cigarettes on the same plate? It’s called Sex And The City, not Microherb Gardening And The City.
What frustrates me most about this cultural cuckoldry is how it reeks of feigned authenticity. The writer/philosopher/songstress/all-around queen
uncovered how we have become “a person imitating a brand imitating a person.” While Eliza mostly speaks about how we’ve corrupted our digital presences, if it’s possible to get even more meta, the online person-as-brand-as-person simulacra has seeped into material life through ‘wholesome’ faux parties, 5 AM wake-up calls, and 10-step morning routines. The camera is off, babes! We can stop pretending!And of course, like platforms lining the pockets of tech overlords, the soft-clubbing trend has a bottom line. Entrepreneurs sell artificial intimacy through enterprises like Timeleft and Othership, dangling your loneliness in front of you like an overpriced cat toy (tickets to Othership’s sauna raves cost $70.)
If you are unfamiliar, Othership is a gentrified sauna that has become popular among woo-woo Manhattanites with email jobs. The company bills itself as a third space working to solve the loneliness epidemic through community and, like, mindfulness, or whatever…
Sorry, but the only way I’m paying $70 to enter a sauna is if I get to see guys doing butt stuff.
Yet, “I need friends, I need friends,” the emcee chants to the audience of zillennial laptop warriors at one such party The Cut’s Bindu Bansinath attended at Othership. She describes the feeling of attending as being a ‘self-conscious robot,’ and ends the piece quoting a guy who confesses that he wishes he were on MDMA, and is only there to fit in with his growing number of sober friends.
These events are overwhelmingly sober, as is a growing cohort of Gen Z. Sobriety is good for reasons that are too intuitive for me to explain, but in a moment where this generation’s biggest ailment is social – loneliness affects our mortality as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day – the overcorrection towards a risk-averse wellness culture has pushed us to retreat further into temperature-controlled, sterile environments. We should all be 6 cocktails deep, oversharing about our daddy issues, not making small talk over hors d'oeuvres.
I’m not anti-sobriety and I love a chill dinner with friends as much as a tweaky warehouse rave. My critique is of the broader culture that has weaponized wellness into a personality trait, where every personal health decision gets packaged into some enlightened lifestyle brand.
It’s funny – I see parallel heterosexual and homosexual manifestations of the soft-living epidemic. In gay spaces, tender queerness flies in the face of the long tradition of queer debauchery. Girllllll, the whole point of queerness is to be faggy and campy and messy and transgressive and liberatory in how we melt away established binaries and social rules. It’s thongs riding high and bass down low. And yes, I know some “normal” gay is going to comment about how they are different. I literally don’t give a fuck! Read the Wall Street Journal if you’re so normal.
But if tender queers are misguided, heterosexual wellness culture harbors a much more sinister core. The sanitized lifestyle feels fascistic, filled with strict rules that atomize life into something predictable, clean-cut, and camera-ready. Which raises the question: Is soft living soft at all?
The viral Saratoga water man embodies this contradiction. On paper, he’s achieved optimization nirvana – he’s wealthy, healthy, attractive, disciplined. His muscles are huge, and his face is perpetually plunged in premium spring water. Yet his life reads as soulless AI slop. The only other people in the video are indentured servants catering to his every need. He has everything he could want, except the one thing he needs: genuine connection.
Everyone rightfully kii’d on him because he’s fucking weird. But I see snippets of his lifestyle everywhere. We’ve convinced ourselves that we can optimize our way out of social decline through routine and willpower. That we can buy happiness and eliminate the need for vulnerability, regret, and pain.
I understand why our generation avoids those feelings. I am a victim of the very problem I’m diagnosing. I often choose sleep and workouts over hanging with friends. I’m hyperaware of my diet (yayy give it up for day two of my meal-prepped salad…) and am overcome with guilt when I ‘waste’ time in a way that doesn’t feel valuable or productive. It’s a defense mechanism against an ever-evolving world with no social safety net. You must watch your every step because there is no room for error.
But the room where error happens is also the room where life begins. Vulnerability, regret, and loneliness are not just pain for pain's sake. They are signals for how to live. The messy in-between is where serendipity and creativity are conceived through unexpected connections and conclusions, breakthroughs of new neural pathways, and breakdowns of old mental models. Life is mercurial by design. So, I’m trying to let the soft animal of my body lead, not the hard machinery of my mind.
This is all to say that you will not be saved by the next wellness trend or optimization hack because we are not ‘self-conscious robots,’ even if life might be easier if we were. The sooner we stop trying to engineer our way out of the human condition, the sooner we might actually start living.
Yuh yuh yuh yuhyuhhh and also ppl (I’m included) are scared to live and take any risk. Can’t have a hang without a partiful and the invite list, can’t go out alone without your phone to protect you from looking lame (and prevent you from meeting strangers and missed connections). The ten step routines and the gym memberships are to look good.. online?? In posts?? What happened to the gentle cringe of “I work out so I can look hot naked”?? Personally I am as young as I’m ever gonna be. And I try to remind myself that the time to be messy is always now. Not to oversimplify - but honestly, isn’t being messy a lot of times just living in the real world? Taking risks, making mistakes, hurting feelings, breaking your own heart - there’s good and bad ways to do it, but by god at least it’s real!! Leave the fear behind. Enter human connection. It sucks and hurts and is the most amazing thing about living. I’m mostly scolding my own self with this comment. Amazing read
doing coke at home on the couch w friends >>>>