Obviously, people tidy up for the camera. It’s become conventional wisdom that influencers shove their clutter and mess out of frame, and so do everyday people. Why would you want to share a picture of a messy room? This is perfectly understandable, and we can all relate. There is nothing inherently immoral about wanting to manage the impression you’re making in public.
But homes are not public; they are our private worlds, our intimate places. They are supposed to be where we can let our guard down. Social media has collapsed the boundary between public and private. Just like how our happy memories are now stage-managed into quickly legible bits of evidence, the reproduction of images of tidy homes across billions of images over decades has aggregated into an aesthetic and an orientation that we see taking root off-screen.
Paige Rien is an interior design consultant and former HGTV presenter (she appeared on the show “Hidden Potential” for five seasons) whose life’s work has become encouraging people to repair the rupture — caused by the marketplace of home content on social media — between the way people want their houses to look and how they want to actually live.
Rien is the author of two books, “Love the House You’re In” and “Revived and Renovated,” and she’s made a name for herself in the years since her time on HGTV as a dissident voice in the world of interior design, pushing back against the taste regimes that have emerged out of social media.
These taste regimes, manufactured by large brands like Pottery Barn and West Elm, and reproduced by influencers of all stripes, might vary in their specifics. A minimalist, “Scandinavian-chic” aesthetic has come to be associated with Millennial decor in the 2010s through the early 2020s, but maximalism has its partisans too, as does “granny chic” and “cabin core” and myriad other niche aesthetics.
The specifics, Rien told me on the phone, don’t really matter. Whether minimalist or maximalist, social media’s influence on home design is not about how it all looks, but how it compels people to behave; it’s design based on a philosophy of obedience more than anything else. It’s about an ability to replicate what you’ve seen, to maintain consistency, to conjure a legible and total “vibe” that’s easily identified in the midst of a hasty scroll.
Living within these spaces feels about as grounded in real life as a couple of twelve year olds living in the fort they made in an old barn.
Social media home interiors are animated by the same spirit as our performance of birthday parties and vacations; it’s the reason people spend a thousand dollars on balloon garlands for a toddler’s birthday party. Interiors that are inspired by social media are trying to convince an invisible audience that something beautiful and interesting is happening in these rooms, and that very act of trying to pull off the ruse renders it unlikely that anything will happen in these rooms at all.
Rien recalled the disillusionment she experienced working with clients in the mid-2010s: “I’d meet a family, and I would ask, what do you need for your home? And they’d say, ‘Well, we want Pottery Barn.’ But that’s not a need, or a desire, or even a function. That’s just a look. I found that the content of design media was becoming people’s desires, even though they have wide, varied and interesting lives. That became the substance of great frustration for me.”
In an ideal situation, a house is something co-created, Rien told me, among all of its residents. This co-creation evolves over the course of a family’s life, taking into account the needs and routines and abilities of everyone living in it. A single person might want to create a sanctuary of peace for themselves, or a place to practice a hobby, while a young family might need a shared space where babies and adults can all be comfortable together.
Mess is a fact of life for many years of a young family’s life unless there is someone whose full-time job is to clean up. Just as American workplaces have not fully adjusted to the reality of working parents who might need flexibility around, among other things, school pickups and dropoffs, our fantasy interiors are fully disconnected from the realities of most families’ lives: Most of the time, whether we’re inside our homes or not, we’re working.
Trying to replicate the professionally staged interiors that populate Instagram and Pinterest is akin to trying to perform a historical reenactment of a time when women didn’t work outside the home, or when families of means employed live-in housekeepers.
Excerpted from ”The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything” by Kathryn Jezer-Morton. Copyright © 2026 by Kathryn Jezer-Morton. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
