Babe, You Can't Afford Your Own Taste and Lifestyle

At some point, your taste becomes a financial liability.

You start noticing things. The cut of a shirt. The weight of a handbag. The difference between a good pair of jeans and one that looks good only in a fitting room. You learn which brands make clothes that fall properly, which shoes last, which jewellery looks expensive without announcing itself from across the room.

You develop preferences. Standards, even.

And then you check your bank account.

The shirt you like costs ₹8,000. The bag costs ₹18,000. The shoes you have convinced yourself are an investment cost more than your monthly grocery budget. You could technically buy one of them, but then you would have to spend the rest of the month pretending money is not real.

Babe, you can't afford your own taste.

The worst part is that you know exactly what you like. You can identify quality. You have opinions. You know what looks good on you. You have spent enough time looking at beautiful things to recognise the difference between something you genuinely want and something that will fall apart after three washes.

Your taste is not necessarily the problem.

Your taste has simply been developing in an economy that keeps finding new ways to charge you for having it.

You didn't always want expensive things

Think about the first brand you really liked.

Perhaps it was a bag you saw on someone at college, a pair of shoes that seemed to make an entire outfit work, or a clothing label whose aesthetic felt like the person you wanted to become. You bought something from it. You liked how it looked, how it felt, and how you felt wearing it.

Over time, the brand became part of your understanding of what you liked. You began to associate its products with quality, taste, and a particular version of yourself.

Then the prices went up. Or your salary failed to keep pace. Or the brand introduced a new collection that made everything you already owned look slightly dated.

Suddenly, the things you used to buy without much thought required planning. The occasional purchase became a special occasion. You started waiting for sales, looking for alternatives, and wondering whether you had become too particular for your own budget.

This is a strange kind of growing up: discovering that the things you like can become less accessible even as your appreciation for them grows.

You might earn more than you did five years ago. You might have a job, pay your own bills, and be more financially independent than ever. Yet the lifestyle you imagine for yourself seems to move further away.

There is always another price bracket to enter.

And somewhere along the way, wanting something nice stops being about enjoying the thing itself. It becomes about keeping up with the person you thought you were becoming.

The internet has given us expensive taste on a free trial

Nobody needs to buy a designer bag to understand the appeal of one. The internet will let you examine every stitch, watch twelve reviews, compare five colours, and see it styled by women whose wardrobes appear to have their own annual budgets.

You can learn an extraordinary amount about products you cannot afford.

You also learn how the people wearing them live. Or, at least, how they present their lives.

The outfits are effortless. The apartments are immaculate. The coffee is always in a beautiful cup. The skincare routine contains products that cost more than your electricity bill. Even running errands looks like a lifestyle choice.

You are not merely being shown a bag. You are being shown a woman who seems to have her life together, and the bag is one of the things that makes the picture convincing.

It is difficult to separate the product from the person you imagine wearing it.

This is particularly effective when you are young, working, and beginning to earn your own money. You want to look like you belong in the spaces you are entering. You want your clothes to reflect the person you are becoming. You want to feel that your hard work has produced something visible.

And because the internet makes every lifestyle look like a collection of purchasable objects, it becomes easy to believe that you are only a few purchases away.

The shoes. The bag. The coat. The correct skincare. The better-fitting jeans.

You know, intellectually, that a curated online life is not the whole story. But knowing this does not automatically make you immune to wanting what you see.

Especially when the things you want are also the things everyone around you has been taught to recognise as desirable.

Babe, the influencer got it for free

There is one detail about influencer culture that makes the whole thing particularly absurd: the person convincing you that you need a product may not have paid for it.

A brand sends her a bag, another sends her shoes, and a skincare company sends her an entire routine. She unboxes them, styles them, and tells you why they are essentials. Sometimes it is a paid partnership, sometimes a gift, sometimes a commission. And there you are, watching from your bed, wondering whether your wardrobe is missing something.

Someone else can be paid to make a product desirable to you, while you have to pay to act on that desire.

She gets the bag through a collaboration. You have to work for it. She features five new outfits in a week because creating content is her job. You start wondering why your own wardrobe feels repetitive. And when the same product appears in unboxings, styling videos, and monthly favourites, you stop seeing it as an advertisement and start seeing it as something everyone seems to own.

This is how a want quietly acquires the language of a need.

You were perfectly happy with your bag until three creators explained why theirs was worth the investment. You had never considered that your wardrobe was missing something until an algorithm served you an entire aesthetic built around that absence.

And because these recommendations arrive wrapped in someone's personality and everyday life, the selling can be difficult to recognise. You are watching someone get dressed or talk about her day, not necessarily a conventional advertisement. The commercial message becomes part of the entertainment.

Of course, influencers aren't solely responsible for our spending habits. But when the same products and trends are constantly pushed in front of you, it becomes harder to separate what you genuinely want from what you have been repeatedly persuaded to want.

The cycle has no finish line. Buy the bag and there is another bag. Find your aesthetic and the internet introduces you to a better one. The influencer moves on to the next collaboration, the brand releases another collection, and you are left paying to keep up with a feed that never runs out of things to recommend.

So, before buying something, ask yourself: Would I want this if I had never seen it recommended?

You are allowed to admire the bag without owning it, save the outfit without recreating it, and enjoy the unboxing without turning someone else's gifted product into your next financial goal.

The algorithm can keep suggesting. The brand can keep selling. The influencer can keep unboxing.

You do not have to keep buying.

So you buy it. And for a while, it works.

You finally buy the bag.

Maybe you save for it. Maybe you put it on your credit card. Maybe you tell yourself that you have worked hard and deserve something nice. Perhaps you have wanted it for months, and buying it feels like finally giving yourself permission to enjoy something you have been looking at for far too long.

When it arrives, you feel wonderful.

You take pictures. You try it with different outfits. You imagine where you will carry it. For a few days, the purchase seems entirely justified.

Then the feeling settles.

The bag is still nice. But your rent is due. Your savings are lower than you wanted them to be. You remember that you have been putting off replacing something genuinely necessary. You start calculating how many hours you worked to pay for it.

And now the thing that was supposed to make you feel good has become evidence in a case you are building against yourself.

Why did I spend that much? What was I thinking? I should have known better.

You feel guilty, and the guilt is often accompanied by a very particular kind of embarrassment. Not simply that you spent too much, but that you wanted the thing so badly in the first place.

You begin to treat your own desires as suspicious. You tell yourself you need to be more disciplined, less materialistic, more sensible.

But you may have missed a more interesting question: why did this purchase feel so important before you made it?

Perhaps it was the product. Perhaps it was the pleasure of owning something beautiful. But perhaps it was also the hope that you would finally feel more put together, more sophisticated, or more at home among people whose lives seemed to reflect a standard you were trying to reach.

A handbag cannot deliver all of that. Neither can a wardrobe.

But the market is very good at selling the suggestion that they might.

The Commercial Street redemption arc

Eventually, you decide you are done.

No more expensive brands. No more influencer recommendations. No more convincing yourself that a T-shirt is worth ₹4,500 because the cotton is particularly good.

You return to Commercial Street.

You find a top for ₹500, a pair of trousers for ₹900, and earrings for ₹150. You bargain. You compare. You walk through three shops before deciding. You come home with a bag full of clothes and the deep satisfaction of knowing that you have not financially ruined yourself for the sake of a single outfit.

You feel clever. Resourceful. Free.

And there is real pleasure here that deserves to be acknowledged. Affordable fashion can be creative, expressive, and genuinely fun. Local markets offer variety and the freedom to experiment without turning every purchase into a major financial decision. There is no reason to believe that a more expensive item automatically reflects better taste.

For a while, you enjoy dressing yourself without treating every outfit as an investment.

Then a new trend appears.

Perhaps it is a particular silhouette, a colour, a shoe, or an aesthetic that suddenly seems to be everywhere. The clothes you bought last month still fit. They are still wearable. You might even still like them.

But now they look a little less like the person you want to be.

You start looking again. You discover new brands, new creators, new recommendations. You learn that the affordable version of the thing you want is not quite the right one. You begin to understand why the expensive version is different.

And before you know it, you are back where you started.

This time, perhaps, you will buy the better-quality version. Or perhaps you will find a cheaper alternative. Either way, the cycle has found a way to begin again.

The problem was never simply where you shop. It was the idea that there is always another version of your appearance you should be working towards.

There is a class politics to looking the part

We often discuss shopping as though everyone is making individual choices in the same marketplace. Some people are supposedly sensible with money, while others are impulsive. Some understand value, while others fall for marketing.

But money changes the meaning of a purchase.

For someone with considerable disposable income, an expensive wardrobe may be an enjoyable preference. For someone earning a middle-class salary, the same wardrobe can mean sacrificing savings, postponing other plans, or carrying a balance on a credit card.

The product is identical. The consequences are not.

And yet, online culture makes these differences remarkably easy to ignore. You see the same trends, the same recommendations, and the same aspirational images regardless of whether the person presenting them earns ten times your salary.

The algorithm does not adjust its aesthetic suggestions to your financial reality.

Neither does the social pressure to look appropriate for your age, your workplace, your social circle, or the life you are supposed to be building.

For women, appearance also carries a particular social weight. Being well-dressed can influence whether you are perceived as competent, polished, attractive, or successful. The expectation to look presentable is often treated as a basic responsibility, while the money, time, and labour required to maintain that appearance are treated as personal expenses.

You are expected to look like you have your life together. You are also expected to manage your finances responsibly. And if you cannot do both at the standard you have been shown, the contradiction is somehow yours to resolve.

It is a remarkably efficient arrangement: the expectation is social, but the cost is individual.

Perhaps you don't need a cheaper version of everything

There is a temptation to conclude that the solution is better budgeting. Make a spreadsheet. Set a monthly shopping allowance. Wait 48 hours before purchasing anything. Unfollow influencers. Buy fewer, better things.

Some of this can help. Being intentional about spending is useful, particularly when a purchase threatens your financial security.

But financial discipline alone cannot answer every question about desire.

Why do certain brands feel like proof that we have arrived? Why does an outfit we loved six months ago suddenly feel insufficient? Why do we sometimes buy things that are beautiful but not particularly useful to us, and then blame ourselves when the pleasure fades?

And why do we treat the desire to belong as though it can be solved by buying the right objects?

I don't think the answer is to stop liking beautiful things. Nor is it to pretend that clothes, jewellery, bags, and personal style are superficial. They can be sources of pleasure, creativity, identity, and self-expression.

The point is to distinguish between wanting something because you genuinely enjoy it and wanting it because you are afraid of what not having it might say about you.

One desire can survive being told no. The other often sends you searching for a substitute.

You buy the expensive bag to feel polished, then buy three cheaper bags trying to recreate the feeling. You buy the trend because everyone seems to have it, then grow tired of it once the next trend arrives. You tell yourself you are shopping for your personal style, but your personal style keeps changing in the direction of whatever you have most recently been shown.

At some point, it is worth asking whether you are developing a taste of your own or trying to keep pace with a market that profits from making your current taste feel outdated.

You are allowed to like things

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting the bag, the shoes, or the version of yourself you imagine wearing them.

You do not have to pretend you are above material things to be a thoughtful person. You do not have to shop exclusively at local markets to prove you are financially responsible. And you do not have to turn every purchase into a referendum on your values.

You are allowed to enjoy fashion. You are allowed to want quality. You are allowed to change your mind.

But you are also allowed to decide that something is not worth what it costs you, financially or otherwise. You can like a brand without making it part of your identity. You can admire an aesthetic without treating it as a personal assignment. You can wear the clothes you already own without feeling that you have fallen behind.

Perhaps the most liberating thing is not learning how to afford everything you like. It is learning that liking something does not obligate you to buy it.

Your taste can be expensive. Your salary can be ordinary. Your wardrobe can be a mixture of things you saved for, things you found on Commercial Street, things you have owned for years, and things that make you happy for no particular reason.

It does not have to add up to a lifestyle that someone else would recognise as aspirational.

Because if every new version of yourself requires a new purchase, you will never be finished shopping. There will always be another woman to resemble, another standard to meet, another thing that promises to make you feel like you have finally got it right.

And maybe the question is not whether you can afford your own taste.

Maybe it is whether your taste still belongs to you when you stop trying to prove it.