Thinking About Getting Into: The "That Girl" Routine

If you scrolled for long enough on my TikTok For You page, you would say that I’m a goddamn hypocrite. For all of my complaints about hustle culture, there waits that very content, curated by the algorithm because I can’t stop engaging with it. I am served videos on “passive income” and desk set-ups, workout routines and meal prep ideas. But the videos that may be the pinnacle of this genre are what some have dubbed the “that girl” routine.

This trend is all about becoming “that girl”—the one who always has her hair styled, subsists on thick smoothie bowls topped with an arrangement of superfoods that don’t not resemble high-quality bird seed, and starts each morning doing Pilates in a matching workout set. On TikTok, the trend is filmed day-in-a-life style, a predictable routine that only varies in minor degrees; one may prefer to write a to-do list on an iPad while another keeps a beautiful planner. She is seemingly healthy, productive, and put-together. She always fits rigid beauty standards and seems to have access to a disposable income that allow her obtain things that make her routine more aesthetically pleasing. Wouldn’t you want to be that girl?

I’ll admit that I am easily tricked by the allure. I am someone who is routine-driven, though not necessarily to an extreme extent. I cannot for the life of me will myself out of bed to workout in the mornings, but I have to make sure I get my laundry done over the weekend. I think that the cast of Jersey Shore were onto something with “Gym, tan, laundry.” It is helpful to find a positive framing for the routines that keep you operating at healthy baseline. You do what you need to do to feel good.

It is without question that the viewer believes that girl’s routine makes her feel good. Routine is posed as an alternative way of being; by committing herself to it, she is “getting her shit together,” even if that just means drinking water and making her bed.

It can seem like these habits have a profound effect on one’s outlook and emotional capacity. There is a creator on TikTok who starts some of her videos with an introduction, not unlike what you’d find in a YouTube video circa 2014. She tells the viewer that she will show them how she “went from this to that” (here, we see a before and after photo demonstrating her weight loss from thin to thinner) “but more importantly,” how she went from “sad bitch to bad bitch.” In the videos with this introduction, she shares a few short workout routines and a “healthy” dessert recipe. The “more important” part is not concretely addressed beyond the introduction; we are left to assume that it is through these behaviors that she shed her sadness like old skin cells. She does not refer to herself as “that girl” but her videos fall in line with the genre. Here is the pinnacle of the routine’s promise.

There is a lot of productivity content on the internet, but that girl’s routine strikes me as something different: It is a plan of action with an outcome that is nothing more than a vague sense of accomplishment. That girl is not like the StudyTuber who explains how she excels in her classes. She is different from the polyglot who makes sure to schedule time each day to practice her next goal language. That girl makes an effort to work out, drink water, go on walks, eat vegetables. Beyond that, I do not know what she dreams of.

Maybe this is why the trend has proliferated to a greater extent than I’ve seen other types of hustle-adjacent content perform. It is about optimization, in easy instruction: wake up early, eat healthy, exercise, work hard. At face value, it is not such a bad message. But is it effective? In a recent story for Vox’s The Goods, Beatrice Forman interviews Cornell professor of communications Lee Humphreys about productivity content across social media, of which she says, “I have not seen empirical evidence to suggest that consuming this media necessarily leads to better, healthier, more productive behaviors.”

But what interests me isn’t just that so many people—myself included—consume this content; it’s that so many people make it.

I think, sometimes, about a friend (I don’t even remember who at this point) who told me that when they are watching horror movies, they maintain an awareness that what is being shown is not real, it is on a set or a soundstage, and the director may shout “cut” at any moment. This idea stuck with me, but unfortunately it did not prevent me from feeling wholeheartedly repulsed by what goes down in Hereditary.

Anyway, this is something that I think about when I view online video content. It is one thing to go about a morning routine that others would deem “productive.” Filming said routine as you do it is surely…an adjustment, to say the least, but I think it’s likely that for some people, this is what’s “keeping them accountable.”

I like the idea of waking up earlier. I can definitely work out more. But I know that the allure of “that girl’s” routine has at least some part in having an audience—and I wonder if this is what helps her to go from “sad bitch to bad bitch.” In regards to “emerging adulthood,” the period of late adolescence to early adulthood (the age of many people showcasing these routines on TikTok), Shoshana Zuboff writes in The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism, “Instead of a stable sense of identity, there is only a chameleon that reinvents itself depending upon the social mirror into which it is drawn….Who ‘I’ am depends upon the audience.” The concept of “that girl” is predicated on people thinking you are “that girl,” an object of envy for the success of your self-optimization. I wonder if this is where the sense of fulfillment comes from.

But I will also admit, in her defense, it is easy to suggest that this content is created from a place of care; we are passed the age of saying we’re “not like other girls,” and we want our followers to be “that girl,” too. I know that when I see someone sharing “how they get it done” they aren’t necessarily handing me the key to do the same, but they are telling me which locksmith they went to get theirs. If they can do it, I can at least sort of do it. I think that if I can follow this routine, I will gain a sense of stability and balance, and maybe then all the other pieces of my life will begin to shift into a more thoughtfully constructed design.

Maybe what holds me back from actually doing it is knowing, at the back of my mind, that it’s just a nice fantasy. That “a desire to keep living, not against but with the specter of frailty, failure, and death” is a kind of pleasure that “cannot exist in a fully optimized world,” Xiaowei Wang writes in their essay collection Blockchain Chicken Farm, describing a group of middle-aged men in the city of Guiyang, China, who have gathered to drink beer and eat noodles from a food stall at 10 p.m., the day’s work behind them. That girl claims happiness, but it seems to stem from a different source; the pleasure of having everything in place. I am not convinced that these forms of contentedness are interchangeable.

I wish “that girl” had answers: how am I supposed to find meaning in life, how am I supposed to make sense of myself in the world, how am I supposed to make deep connections with those around me? I wish that she could tell me, or by emulating her, I could find out. But at least, she reminds me, I can take a walk.