this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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The folks that I know that enjoy cottagecore aesthetics most are a married black lesbian couple ๐
I'm kinda finding myself wondering if I just haven't really existed in the parts of the internet where the shittiest folks youre talking about exist and make up much of the culture
Cause like, my first thought is that theres no reason you can't just have a cozy domestic life in a cottage with pretty wildflowers where you just do the labor yourself ๐ thats what the friends in question I'm thinking of want. I enjoy cottagecore aesthetically, though not as much as other aesthetic generes, and I'm more than happy to do my own labor ๐คท๐ปโโ๏ธ
Like even in the excerpt you quoted the people living in the cottage ARE the laborers. Maybe I just don't engage enough with cottagecore folks online, but I don't see anything that really links cottagecore to someone else doing the labor. You can do the labor. While living in the cottage.
Edit: Yeah the Wikipedia page for cottagecore isnt really giving the impression cottagecore means wanting someone else to do the labor for you either
Agrarianism:
Yeah, you apparently have not heard of or been on TikTok, I guess? Where the vast majority of cottagecore content is/was?
Cool story bro
Yes, that's your first thought because you are so immensely priveleged that you have no conception of how expensive land and property are, and how expensive it is to have any infrastructure that goes out and supports a small number of people who live very far away from where most people live.
Can you ... feed yourself and pay property taxes, and provide yourself with electricity and reasonably running water... by ... picking wildflowers?
95% chance the answer is no, and, the 5% of cases where the answer is yes, are the cases where you have a considerable amount of money, assets, investments.
You are idealizing a more extreme version of suburbia. And suburbia is a major reason why say the US is completely falling apart: Look up strongtowns maps of what parts of counties actually generate tax revenue for local and regional governments.
Its the densest parts, the urban cores. Everybody else? They're drains on the system, they are subsidized by everyone else, they get a bunch of free handouts for being isolated and unproductive.
This is the modern, more complex, less directly visible system we currently live under that extracts from the productive and funnels their productivity into paying for isolation that is still part of civilization, to be possible.
I know you do sweetie, but the problem is you can't think very well, beyond the outer layer of what things just look like when you take a photo of them. I know you're happy to do your own labor, when that labor is trivial and essentially useless, and needs to be subsidized by the labor of many many others that you're not capable of conceptualizing.
If you wanna try to do this, go be a homesteader.
Buy some land out in the boonies, build a cottage, put in a well or rain catch system, figure out your own plumbing and septic system, set up your own system of generating electricity, figure out how to get internet out there. Oh and probably a road, too.
And make sure to follow all government regulations while doing so, follow all codes, and don't be late on any tax bills, and keep having some kind of job you can do from out in the middle of nowhere.
You're gonna need at least a million dollars, in cash, not financing, not funds that will suffer some kind of early withdrawal penalty if you try and use them, or, you're gonna have to be ok with ... no water, no electricty, or the home will have to basically be tiny. And you'll have to keep working an earning some kind of income.
Its not my problem that you can't realize that cottages just are an element of English feudal agrarianism.
You read the wikipages, you didn't make the conceptual linkage there, didn't realize one is subset of the other.
Because the concept of actual hard labor doesn't exist in your experience, or your brain.
You do not realize that you are fantasizing, being fairly delusional.
Or, you do, and you don't care.
Eitherway, I don't respect delulu.
Yikes, sorry for trying to invite conversation about our different perspectives lol, clearly that is not in the cards unless I feel like being personally attacked repeatedly ๐ . Maybe I need to do a better job of using tone indicators to convey I'm not trying to start a fight when talking folks online, or just try to more proactively distance myself from the possibility of reading an antagonistic tone into my message. I do use "๐ " a lot, maybe that comes across as passive aggressive.
Yeah I like the idea of homesteading too, I see them as being closely related fantasies. Homesteading is just less of an aesthetic fantasy and more of a reality, but I see hokestreading as a lifestyle as being a component of the cottagecore fantasy. And no, I don't use tiktok, or tumbr, which is exactly what I meant by feeling like maybe I haven't seen the online spaces that created your resentment for the aesthetic. That resentment may be totally valid (for all I know those groups online suck shit and are super gross) taking it out on anyone you talk about cottagecore aesthetics with is less so; I am not those people on tiktok, believe it or not.
I don't think I really understand your position, cottagecore is explicitly a fantasy. Isn't that the point of it? Why would land being unaffordable make it unreasonable to fantasize about having land? Thats why its a fantasy? I'll probably never actually own land, does that mean I'm not allowed to enjoy the idea of it either?
Thats a really weird assumption given you don't know anything about me other than an internet comment. My last job was in the trades and regularly involved manual labor.
You seem to be indicating that any kind of discussion where I can enjoy chatting with someone about the different way we see things probably isnt gonna happen; I hope you have a nice day, take care
I think the missing link that you two are talking past each other about is that there's a venn diagram with a lot of overlap between "cottagecore" and whatever the whole "tradwife" thing is called.
They are both a fantasy, not a utopia.
Thats a fair point. Like I said, I haven't engaged much with people online around the cottagecore aesthetic, maybe if I had that crossover of the Venn diagram would have kinda poisoned the way I see cottagecore
That being said, I do think I did a reasonable job of addressing what I was hearing from them and inviting conversation ๐ I made a concerted effort not to talk past them, and acknowledged I don't really know what those spaces online are like