Soft life as feminine resistance to digital productivity culture: a multi-platform netnographic study of Gen Z women on TikTok and X

Abstract

Since the mid-2020s, young women on short-video platforms have increasingly turned from the ‘girlboss’ ideal of relentless productivity towards the sensibility known as ‘soft life’. Soft life is understood here as a mediated sensibility in which rest, emotional safety and freedom from financial strain are claimed as entitlements rather than earned rewards, and made visible through a repertoire of slow, pastel, domestic imagery. This article examines how soft life operates as everyday feminine resistance to hustle culture, and how that resistance remains vulnerable to neoliberal and neo-traditional recapture. Drawing on Kozinets’ netnographic method, the study combines immersive observation of 35 high-engagement TikTok creators and reflexive thematic analysis of 657 TikTok comments with roughly 450 Indonesian-language posts on X (Twitter), including anonymous work-confession (‘worksfess’) accounts, collected between February and May 2026. Five themes are identified: burnout recovery; the visual performance of emotional safety; the rejection of girlboss feminism; the renegotiation of gendered financial contracts through ‘provider’ discourse; and networked affective solidarity. Soft life emerges as a double movement, withdrawing women’s bodies from self-exploitation while risking re-entanglement in financial dependency and a class-bound aesthetic of leisure. Situated alongside non-Anglophone refusals of overwork such as China’s tangping (‘lying flat’), it appears as one gendered node in a transnational field of anti-productivity sensibilities rather than an Anglophone export.