If TikTok is good for one thing, it’s taking everyday activities and giving them ‘aesthetic’ rebrands. Think of all the kitchen restock videos that have cropped up lately, where a simple grocery store run turns into treating your fridge like you’re the office manager of a high-budget tech company. Or the aesthetic shower videos, where folks show off their museum-like body scrub collections and LED lights. Or of course, the Stanley Cup tours that turn drinking water into a leisure activity fit for a Greco-Roman Emperor. 

They continue to proliferate because people love to watch them. It’s fun to reimagine your regular routines as something fun and special to look forward to instead of dread. It also gets rightly decried as a symptom of overconsumption in our culture– an opportunity to sell unnecessary products to achieve these influencer lifestyles. The latest activity that became a victim of this trend is reading. And people on Twitter had a lot to say about it.