Aspiration is part of being human, but the way it shows up in culture changes. And the version we have been living with for the past fifteen years is shifting, writes Brian Deady.
Instagram accelerated aspirational marketing more than anything else. We created an account, uploaded a profile photo, and chose a name for ourselves. It became a sandbox where we learned to market ourselves: filters, curated feeds, hashtags, the machinery of self presentation.
But there was a problem. We were now living with two identities: the digital self we performed and the physical self we actually lived. The gap between them became too wide to sustain.
Eventually, the cracks showed. The rise of “nofilter” was the first public rejection of the aesthetic. People began signalling that they were not curating, not polishing, not performing. Now, when someone uses a heavy filter, it doesn’t look aspirational. It looks outdated.
Brands followed the audience. They mirrored the Instagram aesthetic because it worked in two ways. If your product fit the visual language of the platform, the algorithm rewarded you. And once it did, the user marketed the product for you. Entire categories aligned themselves to this look. The aesthetic became an ecosystem, and brands surfed the wave.
The generation that grew up inside Instagram culture are now in their 30s and 40s. They have lived with the aspirational aesthetic long enough to feel the disconnect, and the performance has become exhausting. Then the next wave arrived. TikTok emerged, and the younger generation ran to it, not just because it was new, but also because it offered an escape from the Instagram aesthetic. TikTok was noticeably raw, less curated, more off the cuff, but at a cost. Its pace and algorithmic structure were so intense that questions around addiction and platform responsibility have ended up in court.
This is how a tide turns. First enthusiasm. Then apathy. And now, quietly, resentment.
People are uncomfortable with their own participation in it, even down to the way some shifted their accent to match the aspirational tone of the platform. I heard it on a bus recently. A young woman said she was going to Cork, but pronounced it “Cwerk.” It was not an Americanism. It was the Instagram voice, the curated sound that became part of the aesthetic. People can hear it in themselves now, and it does not feel like them. That creates a different kind of resentment, not just toward the system that shaped them, but toward the version of themselves that complied with it. And this is not about being fake. It is what happens when we live inside a culture long enough. We absorb its tone, its signals of belonging. The discomfort comes when we notice the gap between the self we perform online and the one we inhabit in everyday life.
Over the past decade, aspiration marketing did not evolve, it thinned out. When media moved slower, there was more time for brands to understand their audience. But when Instagram sped everything up, the industry shifted from understanding to output. The pressure to feed the platform meant brands stopped paying attention and started repeating themselves. The same glossy characters, the same better version of you narratives appeared everywhere. Aspiration was not being shaped anymore. It was assumed.
While brands recycled templates, real aspiration was shifting. People became tired of the polished, optimised, endlessly improving self that marketing kept projecting back at them. What they want now is recognition, not projection, a version of aspiration that reduces the friction between who I am and who I want to be. It is still aspirational, but it is no longer upward. It is adjacent. It is closer to home.
If aspiration is now adjacent rather than upward, creative needs to recalibrate. Less projection, more recognition. The brands that win will speak not to the online self, but to the everyday one, the person who pays the bills and lives in the world as it is.
I was a songwriter for over twenty years, and there is a phrase I heard once that never left me: people do not want to know about you, they want to know about themselves. When an ad comes on the telly and genuinely connects and the living room goes quiet for a moment, that is the gold. That silence is the sound of people recognising themselves.
That moment is not sentimental or nostalgic. It is relief. A brief break from the pressure. And that is what stays with people, not the promise of a better self, but the feeling of being seen as they already are.
Brian Deady is an Irish creative strategist working at the intersection of narrative, positioning, and cultural insight. After twenty years as a songwriter, singer, and producer, including a period signed to Decca/Universal – he now brings that creative background into brand strategy.
