We need to address the elephant in the room.
Because my blog has been looking seriously empty recently. And I’ve gotta admit, this hasn’t been intentional at all.
I’ve just found it pretty hard to keep up with it lately.
Since arriving back in Greece a couple of months ago, I’ve literally done nothing.
Well, nothing per se.
I mostly spend my days swimming, reading, taking care of the house, cooking, doing jigsaw puzzles, hanging out with my husband, playing cards, eating dinner out, and spending time with family.
So not exactly nothing. Just no work.
All those weeks I spent doing nothing have finally caught up to me.
And look, I don’t regret any of it.
I mean who doesn’t love slow mornings, reading for hours, going swimming, and long lunches.
It all sounded rather healthy and idyllic until the emails started piling up, my blog fell behind, and suddenly I’m stressed because I’ve spent three weeks telling myself I’ll deal with everything tomorrow.
My soft girl era has well and truly come back to bite me in the arse.
Which has really got me thinking — when does slowing down go too far to the point where you start using it to avoid your life?
Hey! If you’re new here, I’m Thalia. I help burnt-out girlies like you build a life that’s aligned, magnetic, and unapologetically yours. Every week(ish) I share content on burnout recovery, career growth, and navigating life in your thirties. Subscribe here so you never miss a debrief.
What is the soft girl aesthetic?
The soft girl aesthetic was basically born as a big fat “fuck you” to hustle culture.
After years of being pressured to work harder, climb the corporate ladder, build a long-lasting career, look good while doing it, and somehow still have a social life, more women started craving the complete opposite: a slower, softer life with more time to actually enjoy it.
And it makes sense when you look at who really drove the lifestyle.
Gen Z watched us millennial girlies spend years chasing promotions, working late and making burnout look like a badge of honour, only to end up stressed, exhausted and questioning whether the whole thing was worth it.
So they quietly rejected that approach and eventually, the soft girl became the anti-girl boss.
She wasn’t interested in glorifying the 9-to-5 grind or making being busy her entire personality.
She wanted more time for herself, more space to actually enjoy her life, and a little less pressure to constantly be achieving something.
Yes!! Finally, a trend I could get onboard with.
Perks of living a soft life
I love the concept of slowing down.
If there’s anything I do really, really well, it’s slowing down.
Throughout my twenties I was constantly told to lean in, hustle more, try harder, rest is lazy, maintain a bikini body, be ambitious but not a bitch, make success look effortless.
I eventually got to the point where I couldn’t do it anymore. I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and completely disconnected from my true self.
So I quit. And since then I’ve been building a life that actually allows me to breathe. Because having burnt myself out multiple times, the idea of doing less felt like the ultimate rebellion.
Slowing down has given me the space to:
- Rest without feeling guilty about it
- Recover from (and now avoid) burnout
- Have more energy for the things I actually enjoy
- Try new things and hobbies rather than just filling my days with work
- Be more present in my daily life
- Make decisions based on what feels right for me
- Reconnect with who I truly am rather than following someone else’s version of success
- Be grateful for the life I have so I’m not constantly chasing more
When the soft life gets a little too soft
When I started rejecting hustle culture, I started rejecting my own ambition too.
I honestly thought “protecting my peace” meant removing anything that made me feel uncomfortable. Turns out I was just avoiding things I couldn’t be bothered to deal with.
And it took me way to long to actually realise this. Oops.
I started putting off goals I wanted to achieve because they were just “too stressful”, saying no to opportunities that were good for me, and playing it way too safe.
I was so scared of burning myself out again that I stopped pushing myself and forgot I still had to make a living.
I mean, slow living is a lot easier when you have the money and freedom to actually live that way.
When you don’t have to worry about paying rent, feeding yourself, commuting two hours a day, working overtime, or whether you’ll still have a job next month, slowing down is pretty lovely advice.
But what about the rest of us girlies who still have endless emails to answer, deadlines to hit, a social calendar that’s bursting at the seams because we struggle to say no, and 700 things that need doing before Friday?
She can’t just quit her job, move to the countryside and spend her mornings baking sourdough.
No matter how tempting that sounds.
And look, I don’t want to keep bringing it back to social media all the damn time but I genuinely think it’s made things even more confusing.
As tends to happen with anything that gets popular, the soft girl aesthetic turned into a trend. Influencers have taken the idea of living a softer, more intentional life and turned it into something that you can watch, copy and, conveniently, buy your way into.
They’ve normalised spending two hours on skincare, working out at the gym all afternoon, taking a midday nap, and making elaborate meals from scratch every day.
Which IMO is pretty unrealistic and unsustainable for the rest of us.
What to do instead
Your soft girl era still needs to leave room for actual responsibilities.
I’m talking about deadlines, work, chores, and all the boring shit you’d rather not do.
The answer isn’t to make your life so soft that you can’t cope with anything remotely difficult. It’s to get so damn honest about what truly matters to you that you know exactly where to put your energy and what to let go of.
Here’s exactly what to do if you still wanna be soft girlie, but actually face reality too.
P.S. I encourage you to save this post (like now!!) so you can come back to it whenever you need to.
1 | Get clear on your core values
The only way to cut through the online noise and decide what your soft life should look like is to get clear on your core values.
Because if you don’t know what you stand for, it’s very easy to spend your time, money and energy trying to recreate someone else’s idea of a good life.
You might think you need a Pilates subscription, electric matcha frother, fancy AF skincare routine, and a perfectly curated home.
But do you actually want those things? Or do they just look nice on your feed?
Your soft life should be built around what makes you feel good, not what’s popular on Instagram
Once you know your core values, you can let them lead.
You can start making decisions based on what truly matters to you, rather than what everyone else is telling you that you should want.
If you’re curious about where to start, comment VALUES below and I’ll send you the exact framework I use with my clients to help them figure out what drives them, what drains them, and what’s actually worth their time and energy.
2 | Stop confusing rest with avoidance
I’m all for doing fuck all when you need to. Like I am literally the queen of doing nothing.
So take it from me when I say there’s a big difference between taking a day off because you genuinely need it and spending months putting something off because you don’t fancy dealing with it.
You still need to push yourself a little. Don’t do what I did and get so complacent that you forget to function as an actual high achieving woman.
That doesn’t mean you’re suddenly back on the hamster wheel.
You’re allowed to have a soft life and still do hard things. You can take things slow without stopping completely. You can still have goals, make money, get shit done, and enjoy your life at the same time.
It doesn’t have to be one extreme or the other.
You don’t need to go from working yourself into the ground to spending three weeks doing nothing at all because you’re “protecting your peace.”
There’s a whole lot of life in between those two extremes.
Which brings me to this…
3 | Read Stay & Slay
If you’re wondering how the hell you actually find that sweet spot between burning yourself out and doing fuck all, this is exactly why I wrote Stay & Slay™
It shows you how to build a life that deeply lights you up without having to sacrifice your ambition to get there.
Here’s how it works:
Alignment: A soft life is a lot easier to build when your values, career and lifestyle actually work together. When you’re clear on what matters to you, you can stop filling your life with things you don’t actually want and start making space for the things that make it feel good.
Mindset: When you learn to question the beliefs you’ve been telling yourself about success, worth, and failure, you stop living on autopilot and start making empowered choices from a place of self-trust, not doubt.
Self-Care: This is where the actual slowing down comes in: your boundaries, habits, rest, and the things you do purely because you enjoy them. It’s not a reward for working hard. It’s the foundation that keeps you grounded, energised, and able to show up every single day.
And you need all three.
Because if your career is literally your dream career but leaves you exhausted, then it isn’t sustainable.
Neither is a soft life full of rest and self-care if you’re avoiding every slightly difficult thing.
Final thoughts
I don’t want to build an empire.
I don’t want to be the CEO of a multi-million dollar company.
I don’t want to manage a large team of fifty or more people.
All I want is to wake up, go for a swim, read on the beach, eat fresh fruit, do work that fulfils me (aka build my blog), drink good wine, have deep convos IRL and live as stress-free as possible.
But I also know that I can’t just avoid everything I don’t have the capacity for.
I’m still trying to find that balance, but right now, I’m leaning into my values, figuring out what actually deserves my time and energy, and applying The Anti-Burnout Framework to everything I do.
Because yes, I want a soft life. I just don’t want to sleepwalk through it.
Until next week-ish,
Thalia xx
