Do Things Your Own Way

In the ever-expanding world of online cooking personalities, Steven Gao has had a recent turn of success in his long form YouTube videos. Known more commonly for his short form content, Steven recently published a video “I Turned My Apartment Into a Fine Dining Restaurant” that has 1.6M views at the time of writing, and the top comment on this video caught my attention.

The comment said “Proof that you don’t need those influencer dreamlike kitchens to create great food” (typos edited), and I very much agree with this. In the video, Steven is cooking for his friends in a tiny Manhattan apartment, prepping on one of those small portable countertops. The intended meaning of this comment is that people shouldn’t feel pressure to have a fancy setup and expensive equipment to cook good food, and that they should just make do with what they have, because the food is the main point. 

However, taking this comment to the extreme gives rise to a more perverse phenomenon where people romanticise someone else’s aesthetic — especially when the aesthetic is more “simple” or “rustic” — and try to copy it in some unusual parasocial way. 

Many of us have experienced the unhealthy overwhelm that results from watching other people’s opulent lives on social media. We see the houses, the kitchens, the accessories, the travelling, and at some point start to feel this pull to just get away from this vacuous luxury. Instead, we start to crave things like becoming a farmer and adopting a “cottagecore” life of raising crops and milking cows in the rolling green hills. But in truth, these are just more trends, and are not in themselves more authentic or true-ringing than the consumerism from which we fled. And in attempting to adhere to this new, “simpler” aesthetic, we fall into the same trap.

There is no romance in copying

Consider a theoretical example, going back to Steven Gao’s video. Someone — let’s call him Nathan — sees this video and its online success, and decides that he too must embrace the NYC hustle and struggle of working hard in a small environment to claim his portion of fame. So he stops buying from a grocery store and starts embracing farmers markets, buys the minimalistic style cutting board Steven uses, and even considers selling some of his expensive equipment. Nathan has begun to romanticise the struggle.

A few months later, let’s say Steven continues to enjoy his online success, and starts to get brand sponsorships for stainless steel pans, commercial olive oils, and other kitchen gadgets. His followers continue to grow, other companies start paying him to mention their brand (even unrelated to cooking) in his videos, and he starts piling on the revenue. He might even start to sell some of his own merchandise. With these newfound earnings in hand, Steven finally decides it’s time to upgrade, and moves to a more expensive Manhattan apartment with a larger kitchen, complete with a peninsula to make front-on filming much easier. The new apartment is on the Upper West Side, so buying produce from Union Square Greenmarket is now impractical. Even if there are other farmers markets in UWS, they might only be open on weekends (unlike Union Square which is open four times a week), so Steven is forced to go to conventional supermarkets as well. And now that he has a much larger countertop, Steven finally bought the big John Boos wooden cutting board he always wanted.

Now, where does that leave our theoretical Nathan? He turned his life upside down to copy Steven’s aesthetic, only to realise that the aesthetic was only incidental, and not a core part of Steven’s identity. Steven never loved how tiny his space was, he just had to make do because that’s where he lived. Steven never loved having to repurpose his sink as extra counter space, he just didn’t have a choice. And as soon as he did have a choice, he upgraded and made things more comfortable. But Nathan is left out in the cold, holding onto the small black minimalistic cutting board from which Steven has moved on.

Of course, this is all just fanciful and theoretical, but it brings out the point that when we romanticise and copy someone else, we are ignoring our own identity. And as soon as this comes to light, when the person we are copying changes, we feel ashamed because we knew better all along. And to take the point further: even if Steven never changed a single thing, never upgraded, and even if he did love his tiny struggle-style setup, it’s still his setup, not Nathan’s. 

Homogenisation of the internet

Much of the internet has become homogenised. It’s not surprising that when everyone is using the same AI to churn out a website for their weekend hobby project, and the AI models’ default design library is shadcn, that websites are going to start looking very similar. It has become a joke in the coding community that all framework landing pages look the same. With more and more of the work being abstracted away from us, we have less creative involvement in what we produce, and we keep our identities locked in a dusty cupboard. 

This homogenisation gives rise to the flight tendency to swing the other way, to escape the trends. Dan Luu’s website is basic to a fault, egregiously so. You might think that the blog platform on which you're reading this article is basic, but it’s a timeless piece of art compared to Dan’s, which violates user-friendly reading width conventions and provides only the minutest amount of navigation. And if our friend Nathan were to design his own blog like Dan’s, only for Dan to eventually upgrade to something newer, where would that leave Nathan again?

The point is that it doesn’t matter what side of the spectrum we are on. If we are not being true to ourselves and genuine in our desires, then it is an exercise in emptiness, and we ride the neverending copying carousel. 

Go your own way

Personal growth comes through the difficult task of knowing yourself. Sasha Chapin wrote about this in his excellent piece on writer’s block not being real because people are just ignoring the thoughts inside of them and instead trying to say things that sound reasonable and popular.

It’s of inherent worth to think deeply about what we care about and in doing so give shape to our own identity. This in turn leads to true creative expression. Originality is inspiring. Authenticity rings true. Words from the heart reach the heart.

The other path, the easy way out of copying others and hitching ourselves to their bandwagon, leads only to a hollow existence. This is true even from a business perspective. Copying may achieve short term success, but in the long term it doesn’t last because it is empty. If we only make coffee shops that copy the old-world Italian rustic aesthetic, then what will people copy in 50 years? What will the traditions of the future be if we sacrifice our own identities today?

"That can be painful. But it’s ultimately easier to take this pain than persist in a false, lonely place, conducting a masquerade that, even if it fools others, can’t fool you.”

— Sasha Chapin