Which bodies move gently through the world, untouched by the cost of their comfort?
The “soft life” has emerged as an aspirational ideal—curated calm, aesthetic ease, luxury without labour. It promises a life beyond struggle, and for those of us who have only known survival, it can feel like healing. But the soft life is not liberation. It is a beautiful lie—an illusion of peace built atop exploitation. It pretends to offer freedom while remaining structurally tethered to the very systems it claims to resist.
Comfort, like capital, circulates through systems of harm. It is never neutral. It accrues in some places because it is extracted from others. Softness can conceal violence when its origins are obscured. It can become complicit when it shields the privileged from reckoning with the real cost of their comfort.
Luxury does not exist in isolation. It draws from deep wells of history, labour, and colonial violence—resources rarely acknowledged by those who benefit most. When luxury is severed from its origins, it becomes a kind of cultural amnesia. It forgets the plantations, the factories, the sweatshops, the servitude. It forgets the border crossings, the lost languages, the ancestral songs drowned in transit. It forgets that every silken thread was once touched by hands that may never feel its softness themselves.
To live softly in a broken world is not inherently wrong. There is no shame in seeking peace, in cultivating space for tenderness. But to do so without awareness—without responsibility, without reckoning—is an ethical failure. Some forms of peace are built atop graves. Some comfort is crafted through other people’s suffering. The problem is not softness itself, but ease that remains unexamined.