Romanticisation: Delusion or Direction?

We have all, at one point or another, rested in a moment to languish in its beauty. This can be mindfulness, but it can also be spurred on by a romantic urge; to worship the moment, to glamourise and cherish. Think about yours… was it summer? Was it winter? Did the trees sway while you clasped hot coffee between your hands? Did a lager greet your smiling lips while you chucked your head back in glee, soft grass beneath your feet in a park? None of this is to mock or dismiss, I assure you, for these are the moments we live for.

For me, recently, it was having a quick smoke along a river café in Paris, looking out on the winding Seine as dusk crept in, light bouncing off the ripples and a hundred happy faces. Upon my bumpy Ryanair return to grey uncertainty, I had to wonder about why we do this… Do we romanticise to love life or to bear it? Forgive me for this rather grim conjecture, but I think we can all admit that the world feels all kinds of batshit terrifying right now. With that in mind, it struck me as funny how we sometimes relinquish our situation-monitoring to revel in a manner more attuned to the subtle pleasures and machinations of life. Through a willing shift in perception, we transfigure the usually ordinary act into an explosion of being. Amidst tyrannical hubris, glutenous empires and bewildered burnout we still, with Sisyphus-grit, render certain moments in time into undying memories tinted with ecstasy.

To go on a whistle-stop tour of Romanticism, there have been many who have tried to narrow it down. William Wordsworth and the other English lake poets would call it a deep surrender to the natural forces and celebration of the innate spirit. William Blake, standing by Visions of the daughters of Albion or The Great Red Dragon, would perhaps conceptualise it as a completely raw look into the human psyche. The German and French Romantics would perhaps agree with some of their English companions but have slightly different versions. Some of the French Romantics may connect the movement with the manifestation of vision, upheaval and strife for utopia, the movement coinciding with their vicious but liberating revolution. Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables, declared at 14, “I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing”. His ‘Romantic’ works still inspire the inner fire of revolution. Ever-defiant to societally imposed constraints, he would perceive Romanticism as a key to the lock upon the hearts of the oppressed, a tool to inspire reacquaintance with one’s emotional depth. The German poet, Novalis, would exclaim in 1797, “by conferring on secret things an elevated meaning, on the everyday a mysterious prestige, on the known the dignity of the unknown, on the finite the appearance of the infinite, I romanticise them”. M. H. Abraham in Natural Supernaturalism (1971) would, with hindsight, opine that “the divine is immanent in nature, as well as human psyche, as opposed to being transcendent in God”, while the American literary critic, Harold Bloom, would say it is the internalisation of quest, the chronicle of spiritual change. And so, by way of summation, it was a movement that de-transcendentalised God, positioned nature as truly divine and honoured the arts as the purest of human acts for the sake of reconciling our torn nature. As you can see, there are many concurrent ideas that share threads from each other. The resulting braid, in my opinion, is that romanticisation inspires reverence for living in both beauty and chaos, passion for interconnection and joy for an odyssey as small, finite beings in the infinite universe: a sort of positive existentialism.

This ideology is still exalted in many contemporary ways. You can rely on hope-core, whether that’s an edit on your reels or the genre of fiction you read, to inspire a little solace and perspective. Then there’s the charming Anthony Bourdain, who told us to “be a traveller, not a tourist”, who approached exploration with insatiable curiosity, who could make getting shitfaced in a seedy bar an act of self-revelation. The act is socially consumed and then replicated in a desire to make a holiday or perhaps all summer as divine as possible: nestling in picture-perfect landscapes or maybe a gentle gander through an old town– hell, I adopt this mindset when I go travelling too, because it is an adventure, and adventures are epic. Even the messy parts. Perhaps it felt cursed and unromantic at the time but in retrospect, sleeping on the streets of Venice with a pal on my 21st birthday, going in and out of food-poisoning delirium on a long-haul bus-ride through Vietnam, and living on a steady diet of goon-bag wine, meatball subs and techno in a 24-bed dorm room in Melbourne was undeniably life in full-throttle. These moments in time are galvanised with a special tint of energy, the serene and the chaotic.

On the other side of the romanticisation spectrum, the youth in China popularized the vocabulary of ‘tan ping’ (lying flat) and ‘fu lan’ (let it rot) a couple of years ago, under disenchantment from the CCP’s “serve the people” rhetoric due to yawning wealth disparity. Here in the UK, there is a similar approach of throwing the kitchen sink at stacked odds because, no, I won’t be able to buy a house if I have one less flat white, and yes, I have cast another storm of entry-level job applications – the Ai response models told me I need to be an ancient being of impossible skill and immeasurable compromise. Through one lens, this physical and emotional dissociation is burnout because of one’s limits - our conception of how things were supposed to be being hopelessly breached. On another level, it could also be regarded, if in on the joke, as a whimsical surrender and a beautiful act of sticking it to the system and simply letting go. Luckily, romanticism contains the antidote to periods of stagnation too: one can perceive their struggles as an emotional ballad; a cigarette outside a sleazy bar after your evening shift, caked in sweat and stains, dreaming of the fulfilment you will eventually discover–sounds like a scene from a movie to me. Perhaps this is a defining characteristic of our current mentality and a spotlight on the double-edged sword of romanticism in late-stage capitalism, which ties into my prior question: do we romanticise to love life or to bear it? Well, both, kinda. The rush of escapism is inherent to a respite from turbulence.

Some valid opposition is that people can sometimes romanticise serious issues, such as identifying grungy glamour in being sad, a trend that took over Tumblr in the early 2010s, which risked trivialising mental illness. Another flaw to romanticism, I find, is that it is mainly an individual pursuit, a pursuit enabled by privilege, which can risk becoming detached or insensitive to many who are suffering. Surely, real beauty lies in connection rather than performance? Therefore, it’s important to know moderation. But romanticisation is a good thing when built around discovery and connection, for really it is the yearning for a better way of life becoming realised. It is experiencing release and contentment as opposed to drudgery. It is a phenomenon that pulls back the curtain on one’s desired way of life, inspiring perspective and motivation. In therapy, I was once instructed to create a vision statement, a piece that illustrates how I would be when all my troubles were over. The mental scenography I constructed was tinged with hope and memory of the best of times. So much so that I imagined something like Send Me On My Way by Rusted Root (you know, that song from Matilda) would be playing over it, an epilogue to a drama. It drives me to continue focusing on my own self-care and development.

It’s difficult to declare outright whether romanticising your life is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It’s a way of thinking that inflates the moment that one considers with a glamorous energy. It provides us a lens to look through, which colours life with a more dramatic or cinematic tone. And it leads to a feeling of being in the wide world, an inexplicable connection to the random lives that you brush past, awe of the nature around you and relief amidst the vast, random, and often baffling comings and goings. It can be a mix of mindful and grateful acknowledgement of being alive. But it can also be a tired withdrawal into a plane of fantasy. My conclusion is that romanticisation is a funny little thing we humans do, sometimes because we want to spice up our life, sometimes because we are truly content, and sometimes because we are exhausted by systems that only create dread for the future, and so dramatism becomes a defence mechanism– a way to cling onto agency and individuality. I think it naturally occurs in every mind as an inevitable response to ups and downs, and as a blissful relief from feeling suffocated or adrift. I opt to lean towards the belief that romanticisation isn’t ‘bad’, and that it mainly occurs when you are whisked away by objectively rad times and experiences. So, next time you catch yourself gazing out of a bus window, pretending that you’re in the opening credits to a coming of age film, ask yourself, am I being indulgent or is this actually how life should feel?