Further Thoughts on Cottagecore

So, this is bordering on some “unacceptable” thoughts to the wider discourse, maybe don’t sharpen your pitchforks just yet. Loosely held musings.

Part of what cottagecore seems to be, moreso than the physical aesthetic of the idyllic cottage, is the underlying unspoken assumption that at last you’d get to put down the internet and actually live a life.

Right? When we see the verbs of cottagecore it’s always the humble cute things you’d expect: baking fresh bread, learning pottery, sewing and weaving, gardening, foraging for berries in the forbidden forest under the silent gaze of a crumbling lighthouse, carving wooden spoons, etc.

None of those things are internet verbs like doom scrolling, protesting, responding to trolls, advocacy, organizing a gofundme for a thing you’ve never heard of until just now but must instantly leap to help, allyship, signal boosting, etc.

Dealing with the perpetual power plays of encoded language, arguments, riding the complex venn diagram waves of in-groups and out-groups and their many many ideological boundaries, being Very Online is understandably exhausting.

In a world where ‘silence is violence’, cottagecore is a respite, a siren song of lullabies. Come to the garden, nap in a hammock, sway with the wind and trees. There’s no internet here you ever have to think about or deal with.

It’s permission to rest in a culture where you cannot stop chanting, lest you be complicit with the oppressor of the week.

And this is the part where you get in trouble for saying out loud — I wouldn’t ever suggest that these are unimportant problems, or problems worth ignoring, but I can feel even here the rustling of torches being prepared.

The allure of cozy release is exactly the ability to not worry about those mobs.

Cottagecore is a fundamentally trad, rightie position that appeals to leftists and has picked up quite a following in queer spaces precisely because it offers a place to exist from the judgement and oppression of being urban / online, which is to say, often, existing at all. Of course the marginalized have the most incentive to want a break, and this one has very cute tropes already designed and set up to be expanded upon. The aesthetic isn’t the ideology, but the best ideology is the one that doesn’t need to explain itself with words and dogma, merely present an attractive world that people want to inhabit and inherit.

It promises ‘you don’t have to fight anymore’ in a world that feels like a perpetual fight, because the scale of the internet is such that you can always find some battleground, no matter how far away. There are and will always be some new problem, some new whale to save, some new system to burn, some country being oppressed, and, more close to home: your friends and family and yourself as you navigate all of these sloshing forces.

Again, I don’t want to suggest that any of these things aren’t problems, but they _are_ infinite. And the fact that they are problematic, and worthy, is exactly what makes them so hard to quit worrying about. They are real, and they are sympathetic, and they do deserve our support.

…the problem we’re facing is that infinite support comes at the cost of our entire being; mental health, physical health, money, sanity, perhaps career.

I love this scene because the ending is left unknown.

“so you’re saying… what, what are you saying?”

Perhaps that’s what makes Fargo special in the wider field of script writing, but stories leaving room for ambiguity is a whole other topic.

“Did it work? Was it worth it?”

“But you’ve got to try, don’t you?”

…and we get on the merry-go-round from the top.

Cottagecore is an escape from the loop.

My conclusion is similarly ambiguous: I’m not sure what you should do, if other than to shrug something something moderation.

Maybe it’s merely idyllic imagery, a pastoralism for the modern generations, maybe all we ever needed was a good long vacation. Some of us have never really had one. We start in kindergarten and just go-go-go until we wake up at 30 suddenly completely exhausted, wanting nothing more than to drop out of life and society.

Maybe we just feel the abstraction of our work / the ethereal nature of modern money in global digital trade and feel the natural urge to do more things with our hands again. To simplify, to humble our production. There’s a burnout associated with being too meta, we feel a meaningfulness drift when our survival isn’t bones and teeth _survival_ but sitting at a desk in order to make marketing powerpoints in order to make money in order to go to the store in order to buy food.

Maybe cottagecore represents the often unknown or unspoken wholesome aspects of The Right: that deep down we all just want a little place to live and to not really be involved with wider events, a place to just be yourself and be free. Build a cute life with your friends and family. Given the staunch bipolar opinions about each side from the perspective of each other side, perhaps cottagecore is actually the one thing that crosses the aisle and digs into the deeper truth that all humans fundamentally dislike being judged, being oppressed, being hated, and that architecturally / aesthetically we have ideal spaces to yearn for representing the opposite of those things.

The logical extreme of ‘silence is violence’ is that you will always have blood on your hands because the world is infinitely too big to be a mouthpiece for every single problem out there — you literally couldn’t fit a twitter feed with all the things you should be talking about and advocating for, and failing to do that makes you, supposedly, just as guilty as the happenings themselves. It’s enough to drive a person slowly insane.

The logical extreme of cottagecore is waldenponding yourself into complete unaffected solitude, blocking out the vibrant world forever in exchange for your garden. I don’t know how many carved wooden spoons you need, but a lifetime is a long time to be making them. If you carved in little faces you could pretend they’re the friends you gave up in your old life. It’s enough to drive a person slowly insane.

If you suddenly had that cottage, but it had wifi, would you still scroll with your angry friends, but in a cozier chair?

If you lived in the city, or wherever you live right now, but turned the wifi off, do you think you’d want to knit and carve spoons?

Maybe it was never about the aesthetic at all.