We need to talk about romanticizing your life. Because the internet turned it into an aesthetic — the linen, the candles, the slow-motion pouring of coffee into a handmade mug — and a lot of us rolled our eyes and moved on.
Fair enough. We did too.
But here’s what we missed when we dismissed it: the core idea underneath all the styling is actually ancient, wise, and psychologically backed. Pay attention to the ordinary. Find beauty in the small. Treat your everyday life like it’s worth noticing.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And it turns out, it’s a skill.
This Month on Chasing Brighter
This month we’re exploring joy, summer, and intentional living — and this episode builds on what we started last week. In Permission to Slow Down, we talked about choosing rest before crisis forces your hand. This week, we’re taking it a step further: what do you actually do with the space once you’ve created it?
When you pay attention, you notice what’s already there. Stop letting your actual life wash past you because you’re always already at the next thing.
That’s romanticizing your life — and it has nothing to do with your kitchen aesthetic.
The Opposite of Romanticizing Your Life Is Autopilot
Here’s the real definition, stripped of the Instagram filter: romanticizing your life is the opposite of living on autopilot.
Autopilot sounds like moving through days efficiently, completing tasks, getting through it. Your actual life happens while you’re managing the next thing.
Jessica shared something in this episode that reframed the whole concept for us. She was an athlete growing up — running, competing, living in her body like it was something she inhabited rather than managed. And then life happened. A second child, a practice to build, years of accumulation. And somewhere around 2012 or 2013, that version of herself — athlete Jessica — just quietly faded. Not dramatically. Just slowly, swallowed by all the other roles she was playing.
The interesting part? She didn’t notice she was gone until she started getting her back.
Pilates for five years. Then lifting. Then last October she joined Orangetheory — and something happened on that treadmill she wasn’t expecting. She remembered what it felt like to push. To compete with herself. To be someone who does hard physical things just because she can.
That is what romanticizing your life actually looks like. Not the aesthetic. The reclaiming.
It’s Not About Scale — It’s About Attention
The cynicism about this idea comes from the way it’s been packaged. Like you need a certain kind of life to access it. A beautiful kitchen. A slow morning. Enough margin in your schedule to even notice anything.
That’s just not true.
The light through a gas station window can be beautiful. The first sip of a decent cup of coffee is genuinely good. A hard workout that reminds you who you are underneath all the roles you play — that’s romanticizing your life in real time.
Research backs this up. Fred Bryant’s work on savoring at Loyola University Chicago shows that the ability to notice, appreciate, and extend positive experiences is a learnable skill that directly correlates with well-being. People who practice savoring — even in small, ordinary moments — report higher life satisfaction, stronger emotional resilience, and reduced feelings of hopelessness. It’s not about having more good things in your life. It’s about actually registering the good things that are already there.
And Jessica’s Orangetheory practice is the perfect example of how this works in a real life. She puts her workouts in the calendar, protects them and doesn’t move them for anyone. That’s not a productivity hack. That’s claiming something that is hers and refusing to let it get swallowed again.
Making It a Practice (Not a Performance)
So how do you actually do this? Because it’s an orientation more than an activity. You decide once that your life is worth paying attention to — and then you find small ways to act on that every day.
Here’s one practice we love: once a day, notice one specific thing you would have let pass unregistered. Not a gratitude list. Not an abstract exercise. Just one thing, held for a moment.
The color of the sky at 7pm. The sound of your kid talking to the dog. The way your body feels after a workout when you remember who you are.
Summer is the perfect time to try this because the conditions are actually there. Light, warmth, a slightly different pace. The world is offering you something. The practice is just receiving it.
Brené Brown’s research on what she calls “foreboding joy” is relevant here too. In her studies on vulnerability, she found that many people — especially high-functioning, responsible people — have difficulty actually sinking into good moments. Instead of being present for joy, they brace for the other shoe. They rehearse tragedy in moments of beauty. The antidote, Brown found, isn’t willpower. It’s gratitude practiced in real time. Staying in the moment instead of fast-forwarding to the loss.
That’s exactly what this practice is: staying where you are long enough to actually feel it.
🎧 Listen to This Week’s Episode
This one starts with Jessica telling a story we’ve never heard her tell before — about losing a version of herself and the moment she realized she’d come back. It’s one of the most honest definitions of romanticizing your life we’ve ever heard.
✨ Try This This Week
- Pick one regular activity this week and do it without a screen or a podcast running in parallel. Making coffee, driving somewhere, eating lunch — just that activity. See what you notice when nothing is competing for your attention.
- The one-noticing practice. Once today, pause and notice one specific ordinary thing. Not abstract gratitude. Something specific: the color of something, the sound of something, the way something feels. Let it register for ten seconds.
- Ask yourself: is there a part of me that quietly faded — not dramatically, but slowly — that I want to reclaim? You don’t have to act on it today. Just notice if she’s still there.
- When something genuinely good is happening, practice staying. Ten more seconds before you reach for the phone, move to the next task, or leave the moment for logistics. That’s the whole practice.
You don’t need a certain kind of life to access this or the aesthetic. It just takes need ten seconds and the willingness to be where you already are.
That’s where it starts. 🤍
Dive Deeper:
- Fred Bryant — Savoring Research (Loyola University Chicago) — Bryant’s research defines savoring as the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance positive experiences. His work (published in Frontiers in Psychology, 2021) demonstrates that savoring is a learnable skill linked to higher life satisfaction, emotional resilience, and reduced hopelessness. The “one-noticing practice” in this post is drawn directly from savoring science.
- Brené Brown — Foreboding Joy (Daring Greatly) — Brown’s research on vulnerability identified “foreboding joy” as the pattern of bracing for disaster in moments of happiness. Her studies show this pattern is especially common among high-functioning, responsible people — and that the antidote is practicing gratitude in real time rather than rehearsing loss.
- Mindfulness-Based Attention and Presence Research — The broader psychological literature on mindfulness — including Jon Kabat-Zinn’s foundational work on mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) — supports the idea that deliberately attending to ordinary moments reduces stress, increases positive affect, and improves overall well-being. The “romanticizing your life” movement, stripped of its aesthetic packaging, is essentially applied mindfulness.