Mental Health Awareness Week: Are you ready for a ‘feral girl’ summer?

Anyone who’s spent more than a few minutes on TikTok understands how quickly the algorithm can rewire itself to display content that goes from helpful – ‘easy healthy midweek meals’ – to harmful – ‘what I eat in a day as a model’ – should you pause for one second too long on a clip of a smiling fresh-faced woman in a matching crop top and leggings. 

The app’s ability to read your subconscious interests through how fast or slow you swipe your thumb on a video is what makes it so popular (and addictive), but it’s equally what makes it so damaging. While similar content has been around since the dawn of the internet on sites such as Tumblr, never has it been quite so easy to find, nor as insidious. 

In 2021, this culminated in millions of mostly slim, mostly white women sitting in front of their screens in a tidy, sunlit room doing morning meditation, before sipping a green smoothie, and beginning an elaborate skincare routine. Some would journal, while others would incorporate yoga. All of them were ‘That Girl’: a self-optimised young woman who somehow manages to not just be the epitome of health, but also professionally successful, lucky in love, and popular in social circles. How? By waking up at the crack of dawn (5.30am, to be specific) to seize the day with a rigorous, unrelenting routine – and then document it online for others to copy. 

The ‘That Girl’ trend is the visual embodiment of peak wellness. It blends traditional tropes associated with the trillion-dollar industry with toxic positivity and the hustle and girl-boss culture we thought we’d rid ourselves of just 12 months earlier. It highlights how synonymous the likes of privilege, money and products have become with looking after one’s self, and how fast the likes of self-optimisation and self-care can become damaging and impossible standards to hold ourselves to. While a small portion of people relate to a wellness routine that includes beginning the day with a downward dog, many find the idea exclusionary. 

‘The way the term “wellness” is increasingly marketed – and how the media covers it – is very wrong and limited,’ says Beth McGroarty, vice president of research at the Global Wellness Institute. ‘The industry has been rightly accused of a too-narrow focus on the wealthy (or more specifically, wealthy white women) and has long been felt to be dominated by expensive classes, travel destinations, tonics, and potions.’  

McGroarty notes, wellness should incorporate physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, and environmental wellbeing. It shouldn’t be a ‘one size fits all’ approach and moreover, many of the facets that make up true wellness, such as community and getting outside in nature, can’t be bought. 

Thankfully, there’s been something of a social movement taking hold recently online; instead of self-optimisation videos filling up the For You feed, young people everywhere are documenting their most ‘feral’ moments, ranging from waking up with last night’s makeup on to ditching a rigid routine and staying out to party with friends. The trend is being dubbed ‘feral girl summer’, or having ‘goblin energy’ by Gen Z on TikTok, where the hilariously named content is not only entertaining, but it also pushes against the ‘That Girl’ aesthetic and its coinciding elitist wellness message one messy post at a time. 

TikTok’s ‘feral’ content may be mostly tongue in cheek, but it speaks to a wider societal shift away from the rigid way wellness has been marketed to us and towards embracing an inclusive model: one where it’s OK to accidentally get drunk at dinner and miss your scheduled Saturday morning workout (and it’s OK if you hate green juice, too. Same). 

The wellness equilibrium we so desperately need is likely somewhere in the middle: a bit of Goop mixed with some goblin energy. Wellness can be about waking up to journal morning pages, but it definitely doesn’t have to be. As Gen Z would say, go to the party – just balance being ‘feral’ this summer with drinking water and getting enough sleep afterwards.