There is something strangely exhausting about watching Dua Lipa have breakfast. Not because he does anything questionable, but because he does it too well. Effortlessly chain together an endless succession of Mediterranean sunsets. And, somehow, fantasy no longer means being rich. Fantasy is having energy. As if the difference between Dua and us was not the bank account, but having understood something before the rest: that life happens outside the home. Dua Lipa is always out. And, deep down, that is the true fantasy.
We all want Dua Lipa’s life because it seems like an existence where pleasure and discipline have finally made peace. Where productivity coexists with leisure. It is the definitive neoliberal dream, optimizing even the enjoyment.
It doesn’t matter if you are in Paris, Ibiza or a tiny restaurant in Palermo where the tables are too small. The feeling is always the same. Dua understands that living consists of moving towards pleasure with professional discipline. While the rest of us are feeling guilty for not having “seized the day,” she seems to have understood that seizing the day can mean exactly the opposite, sitting in the sun for three hours producing absolutely nothing.
The Internet is obsessed with her. Because we no longer aspire only to economic luxury; we aspire to psychological luxury. We want that lightness. We want to look at a terrace in the sun and feel that we have the right to sit. We want to make improvised plans. We want to live as if we were foreigners in our own city.
For years they convinced us that success had a specific corporate aesthetic. Now the pendulum swings somewhere else. The new cultural aspiration is to downplay work. The dream is no longer to become CEO; The dream is to spend any given Tuesday without looking at your phone, as if time had no owner.
Dua Lipa represents exactly that. He doesn’t work less than anyone else, but he has managed to build an image where work disappears. He never seems to be “managing things.” He never seems to run. We see her dancing in a club, walking leisurely, kissing on a motorcycle, smoking on a terrace. Even his photographs scream, “get out of the house immediately.”
And of course there is privilege there. But we are ignoring it because we want to see the light at the end of the tunnel in a youth that spends its time inside an office. So we will say that what is truly magnetic is something else, its ability to turn any everyday moment into a small cinematic scene. Buy flowers. Have a snack. Crossing a street at night. There is an intensity in the way we inhabit the world that makes our own lives seem overly managed..
Are we wasting something? The possibility of understanding that many of the things we associate with hedonism already exist on a domestic scale. Your friends are still alive. There is music playing somewhere. The contemporary tragedy is that there is a person reorganizing a Google Drive folder. Dua Lipa is closer to prioritizing dinner with your grandmother than we are.
