First Glance
I had a big chunk of thesis to get to my advisor last week and by Friday I had fully fallen into the paper-writing fugue state that continues to dominate my academic writing process. Sometimes these panic/focused sessions are aided by a white noise generator or a pomodoro timer but this time it was our good friend the LoFi Study Girl who helped me through. LoFi Girl (formerly ChilledCow) is a 24/7 stream of “lofi hip hop beats to study/relax to” accompanied by a looping animation of a cozy girl getting some writing done while jamming to tunes in her headphones. Despite being trapped in an endless loop, the Study Girl transcends her purpose as a focus tool to become a piece of aspirational internet culture.
Double Take
When you’re working in Study Girl’s company, you can’t help but want to be her. Sitting in her cozy sweater with a cat on the windowsill looking out on a Studio Ghibli city skyline, her desk cluttered but not overwhelmingly so. Listening last week, mesmerized by her loop of soft focus, I found that you can take the fantasy a step further by creating your own LoFi avatar which I promptly did:
I’m not the only one trying to live out their study fantasy, just look at all the people who have created unique versions of Study Girl for their own cities and countries. The “aesthetics” of dark/light academia have a similar pull, curating your life around leather bound notebooks, oxford shoes, and prep school blazers to bring your Harry Potter fantasy to life. And while I’m drawn to the vicarious fantasy of a LoFi life, I’m equally unnerved by the whole thing. Why was I spending time pining for this studious fantasy to distract myself from the studious life I should actually be living? Is the grass just greener from the other side or am I just not cut out for this whole thing?
Hindsight
The attractive thing about these imagined scholastic lifestyles is that they flip between reality and fantasy. There is real joy to academic pursuits and there are moments when I do feel like LoFi Girl, finding a flow while sinking into an author’s ideas or putting words on the page. But these moments of satisfaction are wrapped up in what my advisor often refers to as “the reality of the neoliberal university.” Even at the most dark academia university there is, my success hinges on feeding myself and paying student loans on a thin living stipend, pulling resources from a library that is being bled dry by the academic publishing industry, and working things out with a network of underpaid administrators whose turnover rate outpaces the students. Maybe the LoFi girl deals with these things, but in her little looped life she never seems to show it. She just keeps writing words we can never read into her vacuum of a notebook, listening to music we’ll never hear.