The curated life (and other expensive delusions).

A deep dive on beautiful, useless things and the people who buy them.

I have been personally victimised by a scented candle.

It was not a normal candle. It was a $180 soy wax candle in a glass vessel, and the label - minimalist, white with black cursive text - described its scent as “petrichor and wild sage.” I do not know what petrichor smells like. Nobody does. But I bought it because it was sitting on a marble shelf in a bougie boutique that smelled like someone else’s life, and I briefly believed that purchasing it would make me the kind of person who irons their bedsheets.

This is what I’m compelled to write about here. Whatever the internet has decided to call it this week, the condition is simpler and more universal than any label. It is the deeply human, slightly embarrassing thought that if you get the surfaces right, the substance will follow. That you are one linen bedsheet set away from becoming the person you imagine when you close your eyes at night.

You know the person. She reads in the morning (and full chapters at that). She journals. Her kitchen bench has three items on it, all of them beautiful, none of them a half-eaten block of Caramilk. She has a “signature scent” - and she even layers her fragrances. Her shelves are not organised by colour, but they could be, because she has taste and also enough books. She probably even drinks matcha (just why?)

I am not this woman. My shelves have too much on them and I like it that way.

The thing is, I know this about myself. Everyone engaged in the curated life knows this about themselves. That is what makes it interesting. We are doing it with our eyes wide open, one hand on the shopping cart and the other clutching the vague hope that a well-chosen cushion might be a personality.

The Victorians did this too, by the way. They just had worse lighting and more taxidermy. Every generation has a version of the same ritual. The mid-century modernists convinced themselves that a well-designed chair could fix society. The seventies thought macrame and dreamcatchers could do the same. We are no different, except our ritual now involves an algorithm that knows exactly which ceramic mug will trigger an identity crisis at 2am.

And it works. Not in the way the candle promised, obviously. Nobody has ever become more centred because they switched to patchouli. But the act of choosing, of curating, of deciding that your environment should look and feel a certain way, scratches something real. It is a small, daily vote for the idea that how you live should be intentional rather than accidental. Which is either a meaningful philosophical position or an elaborate justification for spending eighty dollars on a soap dish. I accept both interpretations.

Let’s not forget all the maintenance. The curated life is a full-time job that nobody is paying you for. You cannot simply buy the linen sheets. You must wash them on a gentle cycle, hang them in the sun because the dryer will ruin the texture, and then iron them, which is something I have done exactly zero times in my adult life. The Pinterest version of the aesthetic life has been quietly edited to remove the bit where you are standing over an ironing board at 7am questioning every decision that led you here.

There is also the vocabulary. You cannot simply like a colour. You must be “drawn to a palette.” You do not buy furniture. You “invest in pieces.” Your house is not messy. It is “maximalist,” which is a word that means messy but in a fancy font. The curated life requires its own language, and that language exists primarily to make spending decisions sound like a way of life.

I say all of this with love. Because underneath the absurdity, underneath the $180 candle, the linen bedsheets, and the bespoke rug there is something worth defending. The desire to make your corner of the world a bit more beautiful is not frivolous. It is possibly one of the better impulses we have. The fact that it has been co-opted by marketing and filtered through social media is irrelevant. The impulse is human. It always was.

The candle is still on my shelf. Unlit. It has become, through sheer persistence of presence, part of the landscape. I see it every morning. It does not make me calmer. It does not make me more intentional. But it is beautiful, and it cost a hundred and eighty dollars, and at this point lighting it would feel like burning money.

One day I will strike the match, let a hundred and eighty dollars burn down to nothing, and stop curating a life I could just live.

Some things curate themselves.