Escaping the Effort Paradox

Congratulations, Gen Z! We’ve finally transcended centuries of meticulous self-presentation to embrace the new frontier of cool: the Cult of Low Effort. We can grow out our hair and wear sneakers to parties, and it’s okay to leave the house in the joggers we slept in last night.

But our low-maintenance lifestyle isn’t everything we make it out to be. Behind closed doors, more of us than we’d like to admit invest an enormous amount of effort into our perceived effortlessness. We front-load our beauty routines—stockpiling skincare products instead of makeup—and investing in sleek running gear we’ll never break a jog in. We sift through every outfit we own to find one that looks as if we’d simply thrown it on. Are you seeing the paradox yet?

Our obsession with appearing effortless exposes the dark underbelly of the self-love movement: we’re “supposed”to accept ourselves exactly the way we are, and if we don’t feel that way—if we’re only confident once we’ve put some elbow grease into our appearances—we’ve failed, right?

Maybe it reflects our changing relationships with public figures. Social media has vastly broadened our access to celebrity lives: suddenly, we peruse supermodels’ jetlagged selfies and double-tap snapshots of influencers in leggings; we see them radiant and fresh-faced, without the bells and whistles reserved for red carpet appearances. Our standard of beauty could be adapting towards these new, all-natural paradigms.

Or maybe the phenomenon is partially rooted in outdated, binary-gender generalizations: we could attempt to trace it to a delicate sect of heteromasculinity that drives its strain of male-identifying persons away from self-maintenance, or we could attribute the shift to the perceived female tendency to compete for attention. More optimistically, perhaps the reverse is true: maybe our monumental effort to appear effortless is our attempt to rebel against our respective gender standards and abandon our dated obligation to attract a mate.

Maybe impatience plays a role, too. Effortlessness and immediacy appeal to us in every facet of our lives: after all, we’ve ushered in the rise of fast-casual food, 4G, media streaming, and Amazon Prime, among other developments. Our generation doesn’t want to spend an hour wielding a curling iron when we can move mountains faster than we can say, “instant gratification.”

Whatever the reasoning behind our collective psyche, we try remarkably hard to pretend we’re not trying. We have tricks up our sleeves, not limited to: wildly oversized clothes; no-makeup-makeup brands (think Glossier or Fluff); the ugly-chic genre in all its uncomfortable glory (ask the writer about her zip-off cargo pants); and even straightup lying. The truth is that it doesn’t really matter why we choose to perpetuate the cycle of trying hard to feign effortlessness. The other truth, the one at the heart of the matter, is that we really don’t need to try so hard. Nor, however, do we need to stop trying. It’s okay, even in our era of personal acceptance, to work on our appearances if it makes us feel good. It’s okay to be a little vain about our imperfections, even in a world in which nobody’s an object and beauty is universal.

Writing MIKKI JANOWER

Illustration MIKKI JANOWER