Words: Anna Williamson (she/her)
What we are sold as ‘self-improvement’ is, more often than not, self-erasure: the slow replacement of reflection with panoptic performance.
It’s 2026: New Year, New You. Maybe you’re part of the 92% of Gen Z with a long list of resolutions: successfully run a 10k, cook a new meal every week, or even read a book for once.
Our generation is truly committed to the notion of self-improvement and wellness. Nightclubs have been replaced with run clubs, and late-night kebabs with overnight oats and pre-workout. But, what’s the story behind this fixation? Are we searching for something to feel – healthier, happier, more fulfilled – or to be seen?
Beauty journalist Jessica DeFino argues that we should look to the world of beauty to better understand this phenomenon. Last year, reports circulated that e.l.f. Beauty acquired Hailey Bieber’s Rhode for a massive $1 billion. Yet, there is more to this success story, as DeFino suggests that Bieber doesn’t make products for the real world, but for the mirror world. The true point of her lipgloss phone cases and monogrammed eye patches is to take a picture of them. From Flawless Filter foundations to contouring palettes, our beauty routines underscore how digital images have become the blueprint for our physical presentation.
Since the invention of photography, this medium has become an essential way of not only viewing our world, but understanding our own existence within it. In Understanding a Photograph, John Berger posits that, ‘The look of the world is the widest possible confirmation of the thereness of the world, and thus the look of the world continually proposes and confirms our relation to that thereness, which nourishes our sense of Being.’ More and more, our relationship to ‘thereness’ is intrinsically connected to our image self, as presented on social media, and begins to feel exchangeable with the real, physical self, too.
However, this logic can be extended beyond the image alone: to understand young people’s fixation with self-improvement, we must consider the role of online videography. Our relationship to this content doesn’t just speak to beauty standards, or our desire to mirror the image self, but rather to live like the video self, too.
I call this idea “panopticon pilates”: stretching, moving, folding, and forcing ourselves to comply with unseen, arbitrary rules and ideals based on the commercialised performance of everyday life, and thus, the commercialised self. What looks like health, discipline, and self-care to Gen Z has increasingly become a form of self-surveillance: a digitised neopuritanism in which leisure, pleasure, and even rest are morally audited. The model of the ideal young woman is, if you will, like Oliver Cromwell in a BBL Jacket.
Just look at the 75 Hard Challenge. You can find endless vlogs of self-imposed austerity: no alcohol, two workouts per day, and rigid diets controlled to the microgram. These videos are framed as acts of accountability, yet to whom is this devotion owed? Perhaps to the self, or, more likely, the algorithm. After all, the best version of yourself is now the digitised one, at your most aestheticised, sanitised, and productive.
It is within such conditioning that guilt, anxiety, and self-reproach flourish. Though there is no external moral authority, the panopticon works best when internalised. Shame acts not just as a feeling, but as emotional evidence of a culture growing increasingly neopuritanical – a measure of what so-called self-improvement will cost you.
It is true that young people, particularly young women, have always been imprisoned by the external pressures which shape our lifestyles. There have always been imposed archetypes – the “tradwife”, the “career woman”, the Moss-esque “it girl” – who survive on black coffee and cigarettes. We can now consume these ideas on an endless loop, right from the palms of our hands. These inescapable platforms have become the means through which we understand ourselves and our desires, and thus our lifestyles attain their sense of meaning and ‘thereness’ through constructed algorithms and trends.
The search for meaning and self in an image or a video is an ultimately fruitless endeavour. As Berger attests: ‘Meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist without development. Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning.’ We cannot instantly achieve the perfection of a curated, edited video, and consequently, our digital image can never be fully interchangeable with our physical, lived self. This demand to constantly refine ourselves into something smooth, productive, and presentable leaves no room for contradiction, boredom, or change – the very things through which a life actually unfolds. What we are sold as ‘self-improvement’ is, more often than not, self-erasure: the slow replacement of reflection with panoptic performance.
So, as you set your New Year’s resolutions, ask yourself who you are really doing it for: your truest, purest self, or the invisible audience that never stops watching.
