conformitygate

23 Aug, 2026

“conformitygate” is the fan theory that, by the end of Stranger Things, the main characters may believe they’ve won their freedom, but they’re trapped in a false world overseen by Vecna—primarily evidenced by the tragedy that they’ve all seemingly chosen to repeat their parents’ patterns and mistakes. (It’s tied into the parallel fan theory that the Duffer Brothers didn’t know how to end the show and that, without a Mrs Duffer around anymore to do any script-doctoring, the Duffers turned to ChatGPT.)

I’d gotten a suburban mom purse off of TikTok—a “crossbody” “bum bag.” It has a matching chapstick holder hanging off its gold jump ring, along with whatever other bag charms.

“Love those,” the zillennial told me, of the patterned neoprene chapstick holder.

“Have you gotten ads for these?” I suddenly asked her.

She paused. “No,” she said carefully.

My eyes narrowed. Uh-huh. “Yeah, you’re too young to get ads for these,” I said to her. It is the SUV of mom bags.

“But I love it!” she assured me. “It reminds me of, uh,” and she frowned. “Louis Vuitton. Vuitton?”

“Vuitton,” I said. I stared at her. I looked down at my bag, gazed upon it, confused. “Oh, the checkerboard print?” I finally asked, horrified, and she nodded enthusiastically¹. Ugh. I wish someone had told me sooner.

My distress was written all over my face. “Totes are really in right now,” the zillennial mumbled.

“Totes?” I asked her. I was picturing the wrong thing, like a reusable grocery bag.

“Like, a tote bag,” she said. This inexplicably cleared things up.

I sighed. “I do love a tote,” I said to her. “I used to carry, every day, a, uh, an Everlane tote.” Two canvas Everlane totes and a leather Fluevog tote, actually—not all at once². Quince is probably the new Everlane, same idealistic business model³.

I showed the same bag to my best friend. The bag can fit an iPad Mini—meaning I can carry my little tablet and keyboard to writing night, or to the coffee shop, both of which are a couple cities away. But also, the buckles on my favorite worn-out green purse had been giving up for a while. The entire bag had fallen off my arm in public: a humiliating display. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but it was going to be the last time.

I’d looked up how to fix the buckle. I was firmly entering “hire a cobbler” territory, I realized, an expense that just didn’t make sense for a ‘utility bag’ that was beginning to look sad in other ways⁴. I’d perused the bags TikTok had been advertising to me, had ultimately chosen a capacious crossbody bag with gold hardware and a nylon strap⁵.

I’d excitedly told K about the bag, too. I sent her a link. She texted back asking if she were seeing clearly, or did the bag look like a half-sphere.

“Yes, it actually looks like a deflated soccer ball in person,” I admitted. Look, it fits my stuff, okay?

My best friend was searching through online newspaper clippings; she found a photo of one of my cousins, now elderly, at some sort of reunion. “There she is, front and center!” my friend said to me.

I was laughing. My cousin still had her funky-for-Illinois haircut; she was wearing a billowing poncho or embroidered blazer or kimono or something.

“She really chose a whole career path where she could tell other people what to do to their houses,” I said gaily.

“She’s very good at it,” my best friend snapped, looking serious all of a sudden.

“Oh, no doubt,” I said, blinking away tears. “Don’t get that vase, get this one.” She’s an interior decorator. She’d decorated the inside of my childhood home.

“Was it your [adoptive mom’s] style? Who knows,” my best friend teased.

Well, and that was the whole point. My adoptive mom was uncertain of her own tastes. She wasn’t sure that what she liked looked good. So she’d buy the heaviest, most expensive furniture; she’d buy art that matched the couch. My cousin had done what she could to modernize my parents’ style, to bring them all the way into the early 1990s; in her absence, the house sank back into 1963.

Some late nights my best friend texts me Zillow listings of old historic buildings that have been flipped, renovated into livable residences.

“This house was not renovated quite as well,” my best friend had texted me one such night—the understatement of all time. I was not prepared.

“This house is mental illness,” I eventually texted back. The style, I explained, was Tuscan Regency Hollywood Regency Rustic MCM Industrial Lodge Boho Rodeo. I was clicking through photos and having an actual panic attack—less so an aesthetic judgment than a physiological reaction.

There is a way to make this cohesive, I tried to explain—I’ve seen “dopamine houses” that transcend all conventional wisdom about good taste, and they indeed ball hard—but this was actually incoherent. It verged on “psychopathic,” I suggested to her⁶.

No surface left untouched. One time, long ago, we’d gone househunting in Austin. I’d walked into the house and gasped. The Zillow listing—written by a realtor who ought to go into political speechwriting—had acknowledged that the homeowner was enthusiastic about home renovations, “no surface left untouched.” This had been another understatement.

The homeowner was obviously a social-media influencer, or trying to be. The house itself had been arranged as digestible vignettes, all lined up against the walls. In person, it was visual pandemonium. The floor frequently changed patterns. The wallpaper clashed. There was a long, narrow hallway, and then more house, it seemed, had been tacked-on.

It wasn’t long after buying the bum bag until I’d moved my rapidly-aging iPhone out of its minimalist, sand-colored case and into a tortoiseshell one. My best friend, startled, watched me stick a MagSafe tortoiseshell ring grip to the back of it.

“You gave me this for Christmas,” I told her, of the fancy ring grip.

“I know,” she said. It’s a Kate Spade ring grip.

“Well, I finally bought an inexpensive case it’ll magnetically clamp onto,” I explained. I demonstrated, amazing my friend with the power of magnets.

My best friend was impressed. My phone was suddenly looking very stylish and grown-up, all accessorized.

“Ah,” I said, realizing it as I said it, “and the phone case has itty-bitty holes in it for a hanging charm!” I pivoted my phone to show her.

She laughed at my giddiness. My high school Honda had worn a bright orange shag steering wheel cover and leopard-print seat covers. My best friend had always appreciated just how idiotic it all was. I was a blast at Spencer’s Gifts⁷.

Now I was frowning as I inspected my glamorous phone. “There’s a noted economic tendency,” I began, “where we trend toward minimalism during an economic boom, and toward maximalism during a recession.” As I said this, I hesitated. I suddenly wasn’t sure this was true. I thought about the popularity of Ozempic: I likely had this backward. (I fact-checked later. I had it backward.)

“And I’m in a lean season,” I continued, forging ahead with my point anyway. “We judge people for their little luxuries, their Starbucks and their Dutch Brothers,” I said, “like you should be saving your nickels and dimes, but it’s all about maintaining dignity in the face of adversity.”

“Yes!” my best friend exclaimed. “Exactly!” (Apparently this phenomenon is currently called the “little treat economy,” aka “doomspending.”)

Later, I watched a very young woman explain on social media that she’d switched from iPhone to a Samsung Z Flip of some sort. She gave a full tour of her new Android phone, which she’d spent days customizing. She told her audience to be sure to turn off “gestures,” a word that she pronounced “guess-tures.” (“I’m gonna need a full tutorial,” another Zoomer gushed.) I bookmarked her video and created a new folder, which I titled “whimsy”: a separate collection from “gadgets,” “goblincore,” “dumbphones,” “minimalism,” and “slow living.”

Another TikTok post was about MySpace Tom’s intentions to bring MySpace back to the masses. The comments were ecstatic. We already have Spacehey, I thought to myself grudgingly, but I kept the thought inside me where it belonged.

My best friend’s dishwasher and refrigerator are both on the fritz.

“I guess I should be grateful I have a dishwasher,” she sighed.

“I’m sorry, did you say that for my benefit,” I finally said after a long pause. “Because I’m homeless and don’t have a dishwasher to call my own anymore?” I wasn’t offended or anything; I was being silly.

“No,” she said. “I’m trying to count my blessings and not just… complain.”

“Okay just checking,” I laughed, “because two things can simultaneously be true. You are lucky to have a dishwasher, and it is infuriating it’s already broken.”

“It’s only two years old!” she said to me, shrugging in defeat.

“Oh, how frustrating,” I said, nodding.

Here I pointed out to my best friend’s son that things really are not built to last anymore. Social media shows me a lot of experimental ‘kitchen of the future’ iceboxes from the 1950s and 1960s and “they all work perfectly,” I said to my best friend’s son now, raising my eyebrows. “And they’re all really clever. The only reason you can’t just go out and pick one up and put it in your house today is, they’re not the right shape. New-build houses only have one spot to put the fridge.”

I pointed across the open-concept room at the kitchen fridge, which lives in the fridge-shaped niche. “A standardized size,” I explained to him.

“You know,” I continued, speaking to my best friend, “a couple years ago ‘Victorian kitchens’ were ‘in’. That’s where you have an empty kitchen with no built-in cabinetry or countertops, and you drag your own antique furniture in.” I guess it’s called an unfitted kitchen. It’d caught on only briefly in the U.S., and only with the insanely rich and eccentric, but I’d found it appealing nevertheless.

I’d ultimately chosen a bachelor apartment with its own kitchenette and built-in cabinetry, I explained to the family now, but I’d originally looked at a small space with nothing but a freestanding sink floating along the middle of the room’s wall. “Because I had my own griddle,” I explained. My own hot plate, my own toaster oven, my own kettle: a modular, small-appliance-driven kitchen. It’s true that I would’ve needed to buy my own minifridge, though, along with some expansive sort of kitchen cart.

Some nights my best friend texts me with her latest ongoing home-renovation updates. She has decided to work with what she has, rather than dreaming of a house that isn’t hers. She’s looking at paint swatches, tile swatches, peel-and-stick wallpaper. One night she texted after swapping the bulbs above her kitchen counter. The problem, she’d realized, had always been the lighting, not the kitchen itself.

“Are those real Edison filaments or LED?” I asked her.

Well. She’d tried to get the real thing, she admitted, but these were LED.

“No it looks so good,” I told her; she’d have to photograph an old-timey, lit-filament bulb right next to the LED bulbs for me to even tell the difference.

She asks me if things look good—if they’re too busy, too matchy-matchy. I tell her she has a good eye. I tell her to trust her instincts, which will never lead her astray. I tell her I like the color palette that she’s committed to. I gush a little. It’s sincere. We agree on certain fundamental things: don’t paint the brick, don’t paint the baseboards, don’t replace solid-wood cabinetry. Actually, I’ve never met anyone who disagrees with all that, but they never seem to be the person in charge of a house renovation.

I get so sad. I have so many ideas.

“And you’ll get to use them someday,” my best friend assured me, “on a house that deserves them.”

I guess it hadn’t been very long before I hated our house. I’d always loved a project, I’d thought. But now I was unmoored.

“There’s only one place you can put anything!” I shrieked. The house was in a planned community; no interior surface had gone untouched. “Here’s where your TV goes, here’s where your couch goes, here’s where your dining table goes, here’s where your breakfast stools go.” On and on. The TV hookups were at eye level, visible on every blank wall: a cable hookup facing the only spot for a bed, facing the only spot for a couch. Meanwhile, the crown molding was breaking off. There was nowhere to hang art, only windows staring into neighbors’ windows. There weren’t two home offices; there was one home office and one downstairs bedroom. I was losing my mind.

I’d always been proud of my ability to ‘work with any space’: accepting, accommodating, and even emphasizing the features that are already there, adapting my personal style to match. But I hadn’t truly understood what “new build architecture” meant before now. What the fuck happened to walls? And doors? I’d been defeated. I couldn’t work with this. This was someone else’s house—where creativity goes to die.

I stopped unpacking.

One of my LA friends used to tease me for moving into West Hollywood—known for sunshine and superficiality and professional glam squads—and immediately hunkering down into my dark, cavernous environment, carefully curated, strangely monastic, all-beige jute-and-linen. The space had started to look either churchy or hobbity.

I told my best friend I’d been saving a TikTok for her to watch, and that it was very important she see it. “I think it’ll—” I began, then caught myself. I was going to say “I think it’ll help you trust yourself,” but that sounds a little condescending, right? I started my sentence over.

“I think you’ll find it very reassuring to be right about everything,” I said to her, handing her my iPad.

The designer is named Alexander Dahlgren-Jawad and, in this particular TikTok video (“Why Is Your House on Trial?”), he goes after Johnny-come-lately know-it-alls who slavishly adhere to trends and fads. (“People have to live in your little art project,” I murmured at one point.)

Dahlgren-Jawad starts out by undermining a self-styled authority’s supposed knowledge. “That’s not Art Deco,” my best friend huffed under her breath. I smiled. The TikTok was working exactly as intended: my friend was, straight out of the gates, becoming certain of her own practical knowledge of geometric forms, inspirations, and eras.

Next, Dahlgren-Jawad tackles an interior decorator’s decree that all fake plants are “tacky.” I quietly reminded my best friend that I exclusively buy fake plants—high-quality deceptive ones—because I had cats that would very happily chew on them. They looked like real, living, chewed-on plants. “When you present yourself as an authority,” Dahlgren-Jawad continues, “and tell people to throw out things that they have, you’d better be certain about what you’re saying.”

Next, he highlights another interior designer’s contempt of honey-oak cabinets. My best friend’s eyes narrowed. “Right!” I said to her, and we laughed. We are both fervently in favor of keeping honey oak cabinetry, leaving it unpainted (or, if you’re really angry at it, sanding and staining it and adding hardware), and repainting the walls. “These are real people’s homes,” Dahlgren-Jawad exclaims, “real people’s kitchens.”

“Being glib,” he continues, “is no substitute for being experienced. So the next time somebody tells you that your house is ‘tacky’ or ‘so overdone’ or ‘cheap’, ask yourself one question: are they presenting a design problem, or are they just performing taste⁸ in order to ragebait views?”

My best friend turned toward me, bright-eyed and exhilarated.

“I love him!” she said. “He’s amazing! What is his name again?” She looked for him on Instagram—but alas, he does not have a presence there.

I’d been sitting in my car—with its fuzzy green steering wheel cover, its license plate frame, a crocheted succulent hanging from the rearview mirror, every interior and exterior surface blazing hot—when I realized I was dehydrated.

I need to get better about bringing a bottle of water everywhere. I have bottles! I have plenty of bottles. But they’re water flasks, not cupholder bottles, with increasingly interesting hands-free eyes-on-the-road operation.

Now that I’ve moved out of the city, presumably for good, I’ve reluctantly given up daily use of my bkr water cup, swapping it for an Owala, just like all the other people who share my car situation. I don’t love my Owala. I’m still using a W&P Porter coffee cup⁹ but, contrary to its perfectly clever name, it isn’t car-portable. I don’t know where my Zojirushi thermos is.

Ugh, it has to do with driving. The Stanley aesthetic, the Crocs ‘jibbitz’, the sticking charms on everything: it has to do with driving around an unwalkable, poorly-planned sprawl all day long.

There wasn’t room for an Owala sippy cup inside my new bumbag, so I started looking up various bottle slings and straps on the A-to-Z e-commerce website. I guess it’s nice that so many water-bottle slings exist.

I scrolled through buyers’ reviews. “This one is so unique!” “You can put charms on this one!” Customizable, customizable. I frowned, pausing my endless shopping scroll.

The words of Mark Ruffalo—antifascist babygirl Mark Ruffalo—came back to haunt me.

In 2022 he said that Star Wars movies always feel like Star Wars movies but, in the MCU, every director can “put their own stamp on” their movie. At the time, I’d thought this was the most IP-pilled, pro-authoritarian thing I’d ever heard. Mark, babygirl, no! My indie darling! What have they done to you??¹⁰

I blinked. Am I trying to put my own stamp on the suburban lifestyle?

I thought about purse charms and Baublebar. I thought about decorating my desk with identity signifiers and good taste. I thought about SUV psychology: feeling ‘safer’ the more ensconced you are by your own bullshit. I thought about the extremely authoritarian environment I’d grown up in, and the way my clothing had changed as a result. A very empty rebellion.

I sat at my desk, frozen. I thought about the movie Office Space, pieces of flair, “damn it feels good to be a gangster”: a movie about being systematically disempowered, stripped of personal authority until, inevitably, three worker bees turn to inadvertent criminal activity.

This revelation had not changed whether I need to drink water while I bake in a car all day, whether I need a car cup of a certain size¹¹, or whether this cup needed some way to be transported hither and yon. I groaned and closed the e-shopping tab; I’d decided to just stay dehydrated for a while.