4 min readJul 19, 2026 07:10 AM IST First published on: Jul 19, 2026 at 06:30 AM ISTA friend I bumped into recently at a birthday party explained to me, almost apologetically, why she hadn’t gone away on a summer holiday.It was not information that required self-admonishment. She had not committed a crime. She had merely stayed home. And yet, her tone carried a faint air of failure, as though her family’s summer break had somehow not been fully lived, as it hadn’t been framed by smiling family photos at airports, exotic locales, and beautiful, lazy sunset meals. One of the oddest pressures of modern life is the need to produce a persuasive and consistent visual record of living well.AdvertisementIt is not just that we live among endless images of people having fun all the time. It is that these images now seem to suggest an increasingly narrow script for what happiness, beauty, motherhood and success are meant to look like. The modern female face, in particular, has been undergoing a curious homogenisation: the same cheekbones, the same lips, the same skin tone, the same studied glow. The range of what is called ‘beautiful’ appears to be shrinking, and in inverse proportion to the available interventions. Certainly, women make such choices for all sorts of reasons: vanity, fun, insecurity, boredom, hope. Every day, we make rational decisions inside an inherently irrational system. But the system remains the system.And if beauty has become homogenised, so too has the visual record of what it means to live a good life. We all know by now what this life is supposed to look like, because its images are delivered to us all day long. The terrifyingly wonderful summer holidays, where no one seems sick of each other, never bickering, where the children are never annoying, where the light is always perfect. The healthy lunches everyone seems to be having at, obviously, beautifully curated tables. Modern mothers, presenting as slender project managers with glowing skin, with a Pilates-toned arm, toting a child while gazing into a laptop, then taking an older child to some genius-level chess championship, and still making it for a margarita with their girlfriends in the evening and posting an impossibly glamorous photograph — airbrushed within an inch of life — of it afterwards. Ordinary life is passe. Humblebragging is on speed.With all of the messy bits of life wiped out, these images suggest not just glowing perfection; they suggest that it can be achieved with some kind of frictionless sorcery, without any apparent trade-off.AdvertisementThis is where modern womanhood has become particularly exhausting. We are not merely meant to cope; we are meant to make coping look easy.What this conceals, of course, is cost.The cost that is everywhere: In the dark circles behind the concealer, in the marriages being held together by women who have been taught from the cradle that they must “adjust”, in the management of children being raised as projects, in the body forever under audit. In the constant comparisons that this curated glimpse into another’s life naturally produces. In trying to keep up, in failing to keep up, in the exhaustion of checking for likes. The distance between what life looks like on the outside and what it feels like on the inside has never been greater.you may likeThere is something absurd about it, and I would have said comically so, if it were not so toxic. Modern lore sells discomfort and self-erasure as empowerment, provided it is presented stylishly enough and gathers enough approval. It reminds me of what it feels like to wear high heels: wobbling and aching while looking fabulous, insisting the whole time that it is comfortable. Women have always been asked to carry too much, but now they are denied a grimace while carrying it.Is anyone enjoying doing this? And are they really having as much fun as they claim to? It seems unlikely to me. More likely, we have got used to keeping those high heels on all the time.The point is not to celebrate collapse, or to sneer at beauty, effort or pleasure. It is to be more honest about the price of perfection, and more suspicious of the images that ask us to admire it.Sibal is the author of Equations (2021)