Tag: life

It is increasingly difficult to pretend we don’t notice it: politics is getting better looking. The modern political landscape is full of candidates who seem styled not only for public office but for a Vanity Fair editorial spread. You scroll through election coverage and instead of the familiar sea of gray hair and uncomfortably wide ties, you see something different: jawlines, well-tailored suits, teeth that look meaningfully whitened by a professional. Democracy is still democracy, but the casting has changed.

There is also the more generous interpretation: attractive politicians are often a symptom rather than the cause of changing electoral expectations. The electorate has grown more diverse, younger, more media-literate, and far more sensitive to presentation. Politics is now expected to communicate at the same pace as entertainment. If a mayoral candidate can’t appear relatable in an Instagram clip, can they cut through the noise of a thousand competing posts a day? If a congressional representative does not understand how they are visually interpreted, can they stay electorally relevant?

This is not entirely new. The U.S. has flirted with the visual appeal of candidates for decades. John F. Kennedy practically built the blueprint. His campaign did not succeed only because he was handsome and telegenic, but it certainly didn’t hurt that facing Richard Nixon on the first televised presidential debate made the matter painfully obvious. The country’s first brush with mass visual politics proved something political scientists still measure: attractiveness influences how voters assess competence and public perception of trustworthiness—even when people swear they are “only voting on the issues.”

Fast-forward to today, and the political aesthetic stakes have only escalated. The existence of 24-hour news cycles, social media feeds, clip culture, and political thirst TikToks have turned public service into something that occasionally resembles public relations modeling. Candidates are constantly being screenshotted, memed, reposted, and observed in high-resolution. In a political environment where no one reads a five-page policy memo but everyone watches a seven-second clip, visual presence becomes a form of political literacy.

Enter the new wave of aesthetically blessed officeholders.

There’s the now-legendary rise of New York’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, whose name was sliced into a TikTok song for its political implications and circulated for its catchiness. California’s Gavin Newsom has long understood the emotional leverage of presidential hair. Texas State Rep. James Talarico manages to look like the protagonist of a political drama while delivering sermons on healthcare and education policy on the House floor. And, of course, JFK’s only grandson— Jack Schlossberg—has become the internet’s favorite example of political attractiveness.

Whether any of these officials intended it or not, the public reaction around them reflects something serious: the idea that democracy is meant to be performed and seen. Voters now consume politics the way they consume most modern information—as images and soundbites. Visual charisma becomes a shorthand for credibility. This is not necessarily a moral judgment; it is a psychological one. Humans have always responded to confident, symmetrical faces, and now we do so with high-speed Wi-Fi.

Some critics argue that this shift represents a dangerous shallowness, a slide into politics-as-pageant. If people are voting with their eyes rather than their analysis, do we risk confusing editorial polish with actual leadership? Possibly. But we should also be honest: attractiveness rarely operates alone. Attractive candidates who are incompetent usually flame out quickly. The ones who last—JFK being the prime historical example—combine presentability with political fluency. The looks may open the door, but they don’t keep someone in the room.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that we often pretend this isn’t happening, as though discussing looks in politics is embarrassing and unserious. But it has always mattered. It mattered in 1960. It mattered in the Roman Republic, when physical presence was part of rhetorical power. It mattered in monarchies, where height, clearness of voice, and physical strength influenced legitimacy. We are simply witnessing a reemergence of something ancient, projected now through comment sections and high-resolution front-facing lenses.

Into this media-slick environment arrives a very real generational tension. Gen Z is watching a political class that is, in many cases, twice the age of their parents—people who legislate their futures without having to live through them. Young voters aren’t simply drawn to good-looking candidates; they’re craving representatives who actually belong to the century they govern. When someone under 45 runs, it feels like a long-delayed handoff of the baton. The attraction is partly aesthetic, yes, but also existential: younger politicians represent the promise that governance might one day reflect the world the governed actually inhabit.

So perhaps this era of unusually attractive politicians isn’t a step downward but an evolution—an adaptation to a world where voters demand clarity, coherence, and yes, someone who looks capable of leading in 4K resolution. If democracy must survive televised congressional hearings, endless push notifications, and thirty-second clips sliced apart for social media dissection, then maybe the least we can ask is that the people steering the ship understand the camera angle.

And if we end up with better lighting in the process—well, that’s just good citizenship.

Main Character Syndrome is, for the most part, a harmless indulgence. It is the daydream of being a protagonist without having to commit to an upload schedule. I get to imagine that the barista calling my name is a pivotal scene in my coming-of-age story, rather than a routine moment where someone hands me overpriced caffeine. I can pretend that the walk to class is a montage, that the soundtrack is something orchestral but modern, and that the stranger who smiled at me is either a love interest, a passing cameo, or if I’m in a particularly dramatic mood, the antagonist establishing his presence. It is romantic, ridiculous, and more affordable than therapy.

But every now and then, reality intrudes. Nothing disrupts the illusion of cinematic elegance quite like deadlines, schedules, bills, and notifications arriving with the frequency of someone shaking me by the shoulders. Trying to maintain the aura of a headstrong heroine while replying to discussion posts at 11:57 PM is humbling in a way that defies language. There is no soft lighting, no sweeping crane shot, just the gentle glow of a laptop reminding me that even protagonists must submit their assignments before midnight. Character growth, unfortunately, still requires Google Docs.

And yet, the charm of it remains. Because the point of Main Character Syndrome—the version that doesn’t result in delusions of grandeur or a carefully curated Notes App apology—is not believing you are better than everyone else. It’s believing that ordinary life deserves a little enchantment. A sense of play. Something to lift the weight of relentless productivity culture, where every hobby must become a hustle and every moment must be optimized. Whimsy becomes a form of rebellion.

There is something wonderfully grounding about scheduling an impromptu solo coffee date—not because it will look cute on Instagram, but because the ritual of sitting at a small table with a warm drink makes the world feel gentler. It turns a break into a scene worth remembering. It reminds you that you’re allowed to enjoy yourself without earning it first. And, should someone glance across the café and mistake you for a writer at work on a novel—well, that’s just an artistic bonus.

Crafting and upcycling carry the same glow. Turning a thrift-store ceramic frog into a glittering desk companion or giving a tired old skirt a new hem does not need to generate engagement, attention, or a sponsorship with a lifestyle brand. It can simply be fun—for the sake of fun. Making things with your hands has a way of making life feel real in a world that often insists everything exists only when it’s uploaded. And there is a childlike wonder in taking something ordinary and coaxing it into something special. It proves that transformation does not always need to be metaphorical; sometimes it just involves Mod Podge and an unreasonable amount of enthusiasm.

Maybe the reason this sort of whimsy feels refreshing is because we are so often discouraged from indulging in it. We are encouraged to be serious, efficient, polished. We are expected to act like professionals from the moment we wake up, when deep down most of us would rather live like the heroine in a Studio Ghibli film—someone who pauses to make a serene breakfast, washes her hands by a sunny window, and believes that everyday errands deserve their own score. Life becomes kinder when we let small things feel significant. When we give ourselves permission to romanticize the mundane without needing an audience to validate it.

And if that means I sometimes walk down the street pretending I’m in a scene transition complete with invisible violins, that’s not delusion—that’s personality.

There is also something communal about the idea. Maybe most of us are quietly living this way, convinced that our daily responsibilities are part of a larger arc, that our midterms, rent payments, heartbreaks, and triumphs are leading somewhere meaningful. That even if the camera never pans dramatically, the story is still progressing. We are not competing for screen time; we’re simply sharing a very large cinematic universe.

So no, I am not an influencer. I am just someone who refuses to see life as background noise. I am the girl who treats choosing a pair of socks as a costuming decision and folding laundry as a montage. I pursue joy without quotas, and hobbies without business plans. If this is delusion, it is at least creatively executed—and it makes the days feel richer, stranger, more alive.

In a world determined to measure everything, whimsy remains gloriously unquantifiable. And I’m choosing to keep it.

There is a version of me that exists in an alternate timeline—one who spends her afternoons in an archive, elbow-deep in 19th-century newspapers, tracing the symbolic architecture of empire with scholarly serenity. In that version of the world, I have the time, energy, and generational wealth to devote myself entirely to the study of how the West stretched its borders, languages, religions, and beauty ideals across continents. But in this timeline—the unfortunate real one—I am drinking coffee at 11 p.m., typing a discussion post on Canvas about postcolonial theory while also memorizing vocabulary for a quiz due tomorrow. I want to dismantle empire. I also want eight hours of sleep. I am, unfortunately, a multitasking anti-imperialist with homework.

The irony, of course, is that the forces I want to critique are the ones that set the conditions I live in. I can’t study imperialism all day because I am too busy navigating the systems built from its bones. Even academia—the place supposedly dedicated to critical inquiry—carries the fingerprints of empire everywhere. The “correct” way to write is the academic register, polished and standardized, its origins in European intellectual tradition. My best insights supposedly count for less if they don’t sound like they could be footnoted in an Oxford publication. The more casually I write, the less “serious” I am. The more human I sound, the less legitimate I seem. There is a silent expectation that the well-trained student must translate their original thinking into the linguistic preferences of a specific class—one with a passport, a library card, and centuries of institutional inheritance behind it.

It’s strange to learn that even language has a border. And stranger still to realize that we cross those borders every time we turn in homework.

Colonial hierarchies didn’t dissolve at the moment of independence ceremonies. They adapted. They moved from flags and gunboats to cultural standards that still govern daily life. Take beauty, for instance: the features most celebrated in mainstream media—thin noses, lighter skin, smooth hair—are not universal ideals. They are imperial echoes. For centuries, Europeans held themselves as the aesthetic default, and the world was taught, with steady pressure and measurable violence, to see itself through that lens. Today, the messaging persists in makeup ads, casting choices, photo editing apps, and TikTok filters that can instantly whiten teeth, thin faces, and heighten cheekbones. It exists in the offhand compliments about someone’s “refined profile,” the polite praise of a “clean” or “elegant” look. We inherited a global beauty hierarchy we did not consent to but continue to breathe like air.

I notice it most on days when I am genuinely trying to focus on homework—when I am reading about colonialism in a textbook that never fully admits how violent it was. I am asked to absorb the facts while pushing down the emotional weight of them. The language is sanitized to make the reader comfortable, to make centuries of cultural erasure appear orderly, inevitable, even professional. The emotional truth—the grief, the loss, the survival—is squeezed out in favor of passive voice and tidy academic framing. “Territories were acquired.” “Borders were redrawn.” People disappear in the syntax.

Meanwhile, I sit at my desk writing about this in APA format.

There is something almost comedic about the situation: learning about empire through the very structures empire built; critiquing dominant power systems while conforming to them in order to earn the grade; writing passionately about decolonization while praying the professor won’t take points off for using contractions. It is a quiet tension that every young scholar from the Global Majority recognizes: the awareness that you are “allowed” to speak, as long as you speak in the master’s vocabulary.

Even the time I have to think is rationed. Between readings, assignments, work, and the minor details of staying alive, I don’t have the luxury of sitting with the enormity of history for hours at a time. The emotional digestion of colonialism—of its reach, its endurance, its reappearance in everyday spaces like magazine covers, loan applications, and school rubrics—must happen in the in-between spaces: on the bus, in the shower, while heating leftovers.

But maybe that’s the real proof that empire is still functioning. We don’t have to be studying colonialism to feel its shape. We just have to be living with it.

One day—maybe in the future—I will have the time to devote to this fully. I will research without the ticking clock of deadlines. I will write in the voice that feels true, not the one that will earn the A. I will read the additional sources I bookmarked at 3 a.m. with the solemn promise of “later.” I will peel back the intellectual surface of empire, not just skim its headlines.

For now, I am a student with laundry to fold, a reading response due at midnight, and a head full of historical contradictions. I don’t have a full critique of imperialism yet.

But I’m working on it.

Between classes.

There is a quiet comedy in being a twenty-first–century student of geopolitics who can give a detailed explanation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement but would still hesitate if someone asked you to identify Lebanon on a blank map. This contradiction isn’t hypocrisy—it’s a product of the way most of us were introduced to geography in the first place. We memorized capitals, traced coastlines, colored in countries with Crayola fervor, and then promptly forgot everything not required on the quiz. Nobody bothered to mention that the shape of a country is rarely accidental—that the angles, curves, and borders were often carved out with reasoning that has nothing to do with culture, language, or lived reality.

Only later, usually much later, do we learn the uncomfortable truth: modern geography is not just geography. It is the fossil record of power. And once you see that, the map you once glossed over in middle school takes on a new, almost bruised clarity.

The first time most people confront this fact, it produces a strange double sensation: recognition and disorientation. Recognition, because suddenly the world makes more sense—why conflicts cluster where they do, why regions remain tense decades after independence, why national identity in many countries is less about shared origin than shared reaction to an imposed boundary. Disorientation, because it forces you to confront how much of the global landscape was determined not by the people who lived on it, but by men in European conference rooms drawing straight lines with the self-assurance of gods.

Those lines are still visible. The borders of many African and Middle Eastern states slice through communities, languages, and cultural regions without hesitation. They were drawn for the convenience of foreign empires, not the people who would later be expected to live with them. And yet, for those of us living outside those histories, they were taught as neutral facts—as though the outline of Iraq or Nigeria emerged naturally, like a coast formed by erosion rather than by diplomacy, conquest, and sometimes outright negligence.

So yes, it is absolutely possible to know the politics without knowing the map by heart. Map illiteracy doesn’t mean you don’t grasp the stakes; it means the stakes reach beyond cartographic comprehension. Still, there is something humbling—almost grounding—about sitting with a map and trying earnestly to understand the shapes not as lines but as decisions. A border that looks clean and geometric from afar can represent decades of resistance. A tiny peninsula, barely noticeable in a textbook, might have been the site of a rebellion that changed the course of a nation. Even the smallest sliver of land can be the reason two governments glare at each other across negotiating tables.

Learning that takes patience, but it also takes imagination. Maps flatten stories, and sometimes the work of reading them is the slow process of un-flattening—remembering that behind the perfect right angle are real cities, real families, and real consequences that spill into the present. Geography becomes less about memorizing where the mountains are and more about understanding who put the capital there and why.

But perhaps the most honest part of this modern condition is that our confusion mirrors the original sin of these borders: the people who drew them were also bad at geography. Many had only approximate knowledge of the places they were dividing. They carved territories using incomplete information, ethnographic guesswork, and the boldness of colonial confidence. If our internal atlases feel underdeveloped, it’s because we inherited maps from people whose understanding was equally limited but backed by military power.

This doesn’t excuse ignorance, but it does contextualize it. Being bad at geography doesn’t separate you from history—it binds you to it. You stand in the long shadow of decisions made on inaccurate maps with enormous consequences. The goal is not perfect recall of every border, but a willingness to look at the map with new eyes—to see it as something living rather than static, something contested rather than unquestioned.

There is something reassuring in that realization. It means you don’t need to flawlessly label every nation to engage meaningfully with global politics. What matters is curiosity, a willingness to return to the map instead of assuming it is settled, a recognition that the world is still renegotiating lines drawn long ago.

And maybe that’s the real story: not that we should feel embarrassed for not mastering every border, but that the borders themselves were never fully mastered—not by their creators, not by the governments who inherited them, not by the people now living inside them. They remain mutable, imperfect, and deeply human.

Understanding that is, in its own way, a kind of geography.