The Aesthetics of Solitude

An Essay about the ubiquity of lifestyle vloggers and the 2021 Korean film Aloners

I have this recurring dream. I lie in bed, in this liminal space between the waking and the real world. I’m aware of my surroundings and I know that I’m alone. Suddenly, I feel someone lying down behind me, I feel the weight of their body, I smell perfume or aftershave, I feel the mattress distort towards them. I wake up. I’m alone and terrified.

She wakes up, stretches and smiles drowsily at the camera. She's in the bathroom looking at the mirror. She's in the kitchen making breakfast, her delicate hands arranging frozen fruit in a colorful smoothie bowl. A contre-jour shot of swaying trees. An aesthetic cup of coffee. 

Lately, I’ve been consumed by this type of YouTube video. A lifestyle vlog, where mostly female content creators from the APAC region, some Asian Americans and a lot of expats living in South Korea, have found a unifying aesthetic of crisp lighting, indie lounge music and an ASMR natural soundscape to show us what they do in a week. These women take you with them while doing chores, cooking, cafe hopping, shopping and working. Focussing on the mundane, they share personal stories, "thanks, guys, for being here - thanks for coming with me - thanks for letting me vent". If the creators have a partner, they are rarely shown, if they meet with friends, we're right there, sharing a bowl of noodles and laughing at some joke. life, food, crying, laughing - we're part of it all. From a downwards angle we experience a week with our friend, the vlogger.

The reasons for making and watching these videos are as numerous as the channels’ combined subscriber count, but in the slew of ASMR silent vloggers, budgeting tips and travel advice on what to do in Seoul, there is one particular theme that stands out to me: a woman alone. She cooks and eats on camera, cleans, buys plants and sometimes goes out with friends. She shows us her outfit of the day. Her style is casual, demure even, her color palette consists of nudes and pastels. She is straight sized and conventionally attractive, if we get to see her face at all. The premise of her oeuvre is being alone. Cooking alone, eating alone, working and watching TV (or rather Netflix on her laptop) alone. Some parts are dedicated to practical things like budgeting for one person, freezing leftovers and minimizing food waste, and some are an aesthetic, well edited, slice of cozy life.

My brain recalibrates as soon as the screen turns to black. I need something substantial, the vloggers start to feel all the same, like ghosts, free-form floating in my head. Who are those women? 

I hear doors opening and closing, murmuring from the other rooms of the apartment - but I don’t dare to look. I know that I’m alone.   

The more vlogs I watch, the more an uncomfortable thought starts entering my mind - how real is this really? The cutesy pastel pajamas, the shots of waking up, the image of noodles being shoved into a delicate mouth. How much of this is framing, lighting and editing? Is there a sexual aspect to this content?

These thoughts force me back to reality. A reality where YouTube is work and being a creative woman online can make you experience the deepest recesses of the human psyche - a reality where these laid-back, hygge creators blur out their addresses or anything identifying about them and their surroundings. This is an understandably necessary security measure, but the blurred out addresses and windows, faces and street names confine them even more to the small screen. They seem to exist only there, life sized dolls living, laughing and breathing for my amusement. Objects existing solely to alleviate my solitude. 

I can’t subsist on YouTube videos alone, my mind needs nourishment. How about a movie? 

Loneliness has been a constant presence in my life for the longest time now, and the 2021 South Korean film Aloners written and directed by Hong Sung-eun captures this perfectly. Of course I watch it alone.

We meet Jina (Gong Seung-Yeon) at work, as she listens to a customer telling her to remove the name of a fine establishment named “Titty Karaoke” from his bank statement, while his toddler tries to get his attention. She lives in Seoul and performs a mind numbing job at a call center of a large bank, including reading entire bank statements aloud, time stamps and all. At a review, we learn that Jina is a model employee and only took a couple days off when her mother died. She eats lunch at the same restaurant alone, while watching youtube videos, and goes home to a nondescript apartment building to fall asleep watching TV. As she navigates her glacial existence, she sees any people who attempt to talk to her as terribly intrusive and says that she enjoys being alone, when asked whether she eats lunch alone every day. Jina is a normal Millennial and I can instantly relate. 

Like me, and probably like most of us, Jina alleviates her loneliness with a constant stream of content. She stares at her phone when she rides the bus, eats lunch or even when she walks down the street. When we get a glimpse at her phone, we clearly see that she is watching lifestyle vlogs. Scenes of women eating and laughing when she is at lunch, or of them driving when she is on the bus. She watches TV while eating dinner at her apartment and wakes up to the TV still on. She is surrounded by ghosts and by-proxy intimacy. Exhaustion and exasperation are her go-to emotions throughout most of the movie.

This is her, a lonely exhausted woman in a late stage capitalist society. Her coping mechanisms seem more punishment than relief, and as the movie progresses, we see her judging other people’s coping mechanisms quite harshly. She hates it that her trainee uses a propolis spray sent to her by her father, to not only relieve her sore throat, but also to remind her of home. She gets angry at her father for finding solace in a church group after his wife died. And, of course, the clients, who call the hotline less to inquire about their credit card, but to alleviate their stress by yelling at the call center employees, or their loneliness by having someone read their entire bank statement - aloud, time stamps and all. 

While in the foreground we always see Jina alone, in the background there is always some kind of togetherness. A couple watching something together on a phone sharing earbuds, colleagues saying hello to each other and going to lunch, people sitting together at restaurants. Jina is apart from them, always, staring at her phone. 

Jina has a very strained relationship with her father, who is prone to lying to get her attention and who, she feels, doesn’t grieve her mother correctly. He left the family almost two decades prior, but her mother got back together with him in the last years of her life.

It is heavily implied that she did that out of loneliness because of Jina moving out. But although conflicted and full of rage and grief, Jina maintains a ghostly presence in her parents’ life. She's installed a hidden camera in their living room and watches them regularly on the bus from and to work. First she installed it to look after her mother, but now she rage watches her father, as he grieves and tries to find solace in a church group that he regularly visits.

“Did you know that cigarette smoke tastes different, when lit with a match?” and “What? No parting words?“, says her chain-smoking neighbor. These are his only lines, said approximately one week apart, to both of which Jina doesn’t reply and proceeds with her daily routine.

At work she meets her new trainee Sujin (Jeong Da-eun), whom she didn’t want to train in the first place. She struggles through her day, as the on-boarding process demands more and more attention. Sujin makes mistakes, is generally bubbly and interrupts Jina’s lonely lunch break to overshare details from her life. After a particularly nasty call from a client, Sujin refuses to apologize and Jina exasperatedly tells her to never follow her to lunch again. 

When she returns home that day, she sees her neighbor’s apartment being vacated. It turns out that he has been dead for a week, squashed by his abundant porn magazine collection, including one titled “My Lonely Nights”. His remark about cigarette smoke, then, was probably his last words, and his plea for parting words was already uttered by a ghost into an unfeeling uninterested world - to an exhausted and uninterested neighbor.  

After reading about how common it is for lonely people to die and not be found for days, Jina starts to spiral and her life goes awry. While finally falling asleep, she hears her neighbor’s ashtray being closed and the door to the next apartment slamming shut. Ghosts start to fill her waking world, as she wakes up to her TV being broken, showing ghostly shapes of people moving around, the cables disrupted by a new neighbor moving into the now vacated apartment. 

Although Sujin gets better at the job and even masters a particularly tricky call, she seems discontent and asks Jina whether she also hears the beeping sound every time a call connects, as she has been dreaming about this sound lately. Jina, of course, doesn’t respond, but eventually starts hearing the sound.

The last straw is a text from her father, who tells her that he’s at the hospital. A quick glance at her phone confirms that he is at home practicing dance moves. She calls him, but he lies anyway and invites her to a small wake for her mother that he is holding at home with his church group, which apparently has been very healing for him. She refuses, telling him that there is no point, as they’re doing it to make themselves feel better, something she judges harshly. Her father rebukes her for not being sad enough that her mother died and that he saw her at the funeral not shedding a single tear. She ends the call. 

Jina regularly watches everything that goes on in her parents’ apartment. In fact, she can’t stop watching, but hates every minute of it.  She watches as her mother collapses, how her father discovers her and calls the ambulance. She watches him grieve, pacing the apartment with her mother’s picture in his hands. She watches, until there is nothing left to watch. 

Until he starts to change and is no longer tortured, but decides to honor his wife and her ghost instead. Jina watches, angrily, as the wake for her mother proceeds without her, as her father reminisces, prays and even lovingly makes jokes about his wife, laughing wholeheartedly - laughing as though he doesn’t care. At some point he looks directly into the camera, suggesting that he knows who is watching.  

The day after the wake, with her father’s laughing content face haunting Jina, Sujin doesn’t come to work, leaving only her propolis spray behind. Jina is somewhat relieved and angry at the same time, getting rid of everything that reminds her of Sujin, exorcizing her from her workplace. 

With her father’s laughing face, her neighbor’s death and now Sujin’s disappearance haunting her, Jina takes the first call. Like at the start of the movie, a caller asks her to read out an entire bank statement, the woman sounds sad and forlorn. After reading some of the expenditures, however, Jina starts hearing the connecting sound, which startles her at first, but then seems to get louder with every line she reads. Frazzled and almost panicked, Jina starts misreading the numbers and, while the woman on the other end yells at her to stop and threatens to get her fired, her father’s satisfied laughing face flashes before her eyes. She disconnects the call and leaves, only to find herself at her father’s doorstep. 

She knows that he’s not home and calls him, but he can’t hear her over the loud music, which he tells her repeatedly, but she keeps pressing on. She rebukes him for having fun and being out and about, for still using her mother’s phone, for never apologizing. “Apologize!” to me, to mom, to us. “Apologize!”, she yells. But the phone disconnects and no further calls go through. She collapses against a pole, whispers “mom” and starts crying. Her pent up grief, anger and numbness finally come out in a steady stream of tears, alone on a street corner, beside some discarded furniture. 

The ghosts that have been haunting her - her mother, her father, Sujin, even her neighbor - leave her at that moment. The veil lifts and as she stumbles home at night, she is no longer alone.

A wake for her late neighbor is being held in his former apartment and Jina watches, unable to go in, how people who don’t know what he looked like or his name, wish him a good rest and peace, and for the first time this is framed as relief. Not self-indulgence, but a simple act of kindness for a lonely soul. So Jina does the same. She calls Sujin and confesses, awkwardly, that she is dealing with a lot and that she hates being alone, even though it's much easier. But more importantly that she learned that one has to bid farewell properly, and she does. 

Good bye, Sujin, it was nice to meet you, sorry for being mean.         

The next day she turns off the now working TV, takes a leave of absence from work and invites her boss to meet her for dinner once she’s figured out what to do next. On the bus home her father calls her and reiterates that he couldn’t hear what she was saying, but as he is prone to lying it’s clear that he doesn’t want to engage. In her newfound serene confidence Jina tells him about the camera, which he pretends to know nothing about, and that she will be looking in from time to time. She hangs up, lowers her phone and stares out of the window with a renewed interest in her surroundings.

A happy end of sorts, loneliness not eliminated, but repurposed - no longer torture, but relief.

As I always take the best life lessons from movies, I too want to repurpose this pressing feeling in my chest - my loneliness. I can meet the unfathomable need to share my thoughts and feelings by writing, and I can tentatively try to share whatever comes out of it with others, although even thinking about it feels unreal. No longer am I just watching lifestyle vlogs, I write about them, analyzing the genre conventions and my feelings towards them. And although I do care whether someone reads this or not, in a way the healing part is the writing itself.

Who are those women? 

They are women like me, finding solace in their solitude. Channeling their loneliness and sadness into creating. They write scripts, they edit, they choose music. And although they care whether someone sees their videos or not, the healing part ist creating itself.