3 February 2026
I have spent approximately eleven thousand dollars learning how to appear as though I haven't tried at all.
This is the math of modern femininity: a skincare routine that takes forty minutes but looks like I woke up like this. Jeans that cost two hundred dollars because they're supposed to look like I don't care about jeans. A therapist who helps me process my anxiety about seeming anxious. I am working very, very hard at being easy.
The low-maintenance girl is having a moment. She's cool. She's unfussy. She eats pizza and doesn't post about her workout routine and laughs at her own jokes. She is, of course, a full-time job.
I know this because I tried to become her. I bought the effortless wardrobe (requires a capsule collection and a color consultant). I perfected the no-makeup makeup look (eleven products, minimum). I cultivated the personality of someone who doesn't overthink things by overthinking how to stop overthinking.
The cruel joke is that low-maintenance has become high-maintenance. We've turned not caring into an aesthetic that requires care. Effortless style demands effort. Natural beauty needs a routine. Being chill requires constant vigilance.
I see it everywhere now. The girl at the coffee shop in perfectly rumpled linen. The Instagram therapist posting about rest (twice daily, on a content calendar). The friend who says she's not really into social media (engagement rate: exceptional).
We are all performing ease while dying inside.
Here's what nobody tells you: the opposite of high-maintenance isn't low-maintenance. It's just... maintenance. Regular, boring, human maintenance. Sometimes you try. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you care deeply about throw pillows and sometimes you can't remember if you brushed your teeth.
But there's no market for that. No aspirational Instagram grid for the moderately maintained woman. No lifestyle brand for people who are sometimes a mess and sometimes have their shit together and mostly exist somewhere in the exhausting middle.
So instead, we buy into the tyranny of effortlessness. We curate our carelessness. We workshop our spontaneity. We spend a fortune learning to look like we spent nothing at all.
And the most expensive thing we buy? The lie that any of this is easy.
On the Tyranny of Being Low-Maintenance • Opuss № I