On Migration as Black Girl Soft Life

A defense, a genealogy, and the line between the picture and the practice

Photo Credit: Pexels | Ketut Subiyant

The Beach

Last summer, at dawn, on Saturdays, you could find me on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Some mornings for a solo splash and a swim, then lying out to read and dry in the emerging sun among the other early risers. And the young revelers who had stumbled out of the beach discotheques and found love in the club, or were regaling each other with whatever shenanigans they’d gotten into after being separated in the vortex of lighting and sound. I’d grin at them over the top of my book, the pleased auntie, glad the youth are outside and enthusiastically enjoying life. Other Saturdays, I’d arrive later and walk the Valencian boardwalk with a group of incredible seasoned women, chatting the whole way down before we settled somewhere for breakfast and more conversation.

On one of those Saturdays I spent the morning on the sand at Malvarrosa beach with an older, retired Black American woman I’ll call Carmen,¹ formerly of Miami. She had been telling me her life for twenty minutes, and I had stopped listening properly, because somewhere around the part where she explained how she ended up in Valencia I caught sight of the two of us from the outside. It was barely eight in the morning. I had already been in the water. There was a book in my bag I was actually going to read and not carry around as a fashionable tote weight. The sunrise was spectacular, rising in orange bursts. The air still light and fresh and almost cool. And this woman, decades older than me, who has forgotten more about living (let alone living abroad) than I have learned, was sharing her whole history with me, freely. Not just the moving and the living, but the cultivation of a life well-lived. She told me about the bike trip she had planned for that summer, across Norway and then to Iceland, alone. She was exhilarated by the adventure of it, and also, frankly, by the prospect of escaping the heavy, all-consuming heat of a Valencian summer.

And at that moment I thought: somebody would call this a Black Girl Soft Life.

And then I thought, with the small private cringe of catching yourself mid-thought: I would not call it that. Well, not anymore.

Which surprised me, because I have been an ardent defender of the phrase and concept since I first became aware of it, since it started crossing my FYP (social media “for you page”).

I relish it. I have double-tapped seemingly every one of those images: the hammocks, the golden hour lighting, the perpetually dewy skin, the luxury bag in the crook of the arm. I have argued about it at length and with some heat, mostly in my head or out loud to myself in my apartment, in response to what I consider shallow and harmful takes.

So I sat with the discomfort for a while, on that stretch of sand and then for months after, and what I eventually understood was not that I had outgrown the concept. It was that I had lived it, all the way through, without knowing that was what I was doing, and then came out the other side into something the phrase could no longer hold.

This essay is my first attempt to say what that something is.

I have watched too many people perform “even-handedness” as a way of sneaking their contempt through the side door of arguments, so let me be plain. You will probably never convince me that soft life is not a worthwhile pursuit. Specifically, Black Girl Soft Life. I delight in Black women’s delight, in our rest and our exuberance and our tenderness and our frolicking and our refusal to perform interesting for anyone’s entertainment. I like the image of a Black woman on a terrace with a glass of something gold and bubbly, champagne or kombucha, I don’t care which. I like her in the lavender fields of Provence. I like her lounging in the middle of a random Tuesday, presumably for no reason she owes anybody, perceptible or otherwise à la the deeply resonant work of Danielle McKinney. Buy the Birkin if the Birkin is what your one wild life is asking for. I don’t care. So if you came here for a takedown, close the tab. Or don’t, just note what type of time I’m on.

What I am going to attempt is harder than a takedown and considerably more useful: to defend the concept properly, and then draw a distinction that matters generally and matters enormously at the intersection where I work, which is voluntary migration. That distinction is the line between the picture of a soft life and the practice of one.

But first I need to talk about the delivery system, because the pictures didn’t arrive by accident.

The Flatpack

Social media delivers ideas the way IKEA delivers furniture: flattened for transport. A philosophy that took decades to develop in a specific cultural context gets compressed into a format optimized for the feed, boxed up in a thirty-second video or a grid of nine images, and shipped to your door. You carry it home. You assemble it in your living room with the tools you have, which may or may not be the tools it was designed for. Sometimes what you build looks like the picture on the box. Sometimes it is a wobbling approximation that serves your purposes well enough. And sometimes it is something the original designers would not recognize at all, because the assembly instructions were never included in the shipment. The algorithm does not deliver context. It delivers the flatpack.

The relationship between Black life and digital platforms is its own body of scholarship, what scholars in Black digital humanities have called Black digitality, and I am not attempting to do the work of that field here. What I am doing is narrower: examining what happens when one specific idea, soft life, travels through the flatpack delivery system and collides with another, moving abroad or voluntary migration. But to see that collision clearly, you have to see the ecosystem it sits inside, because soft life did not arrive on your feed alone. It arrived in a crowd.

In the years between 2020 and now, when pandemic isolation and a global surge in social media consumption converged with a renewed and urgent desire to travel and move abroad, a remarkable number of these flatpacks have landed in American women’s feeds, each one a compressed ideology about how to live, who to be, and what to refuse. They land because the exhaustion is the same, the disillusionment is the same, the hunger for an alternative is the same. The exits they propose are different. Each one promises a different exit from the same burning building. The media scholar Jilly Boyce Kay has named part of this landscape the femosphere, a diverse ecology of women’s online communities that emerged from 2018 onward, sharing the manosphere’s delivery mechanism and, often, its core logics of bio-essentialism and political fatalism. But what the femosphere framework does not fully account for is the parallel landscape arriving through the same pipe from the opposite political direction, one rooted not in fatalism but in refusal, not in submission but in reclamation. Both landscapes are served to the same women on the same scroll, and the algorithm treats them as the same interest. They are not.

There is the tradwife: the promotion of traditional gender roles and conspicuous domesticity, bread from scratch and 1950s dresses, presented as an answer to the girlboss era. The solution to women’s exhaustion in the workforce, it proposes, is to leave it entirely for the home. It gained enormous traction post-COVID. Its most prominent creators are overwhelmingly white — Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm is perhaps the most prominent — with exceptions like Nara Smith, who is biracial South African-German, though her aesthetic and platform operate within the same visual grammar. The “traditional” family it idealizes was only ever available to white, wealthy, heterosexual women, and scholars have noted the aesthetic’s documented associations with far-right and alt-right politics. A 2024 analysis through a Black feminist lens found the movement inherently tied to whiteness. A 2025 study out of UPenn identified the emotion simmering beneath the curated domesticity as rage, and noted that tradwives and feminists mirror each other: both frustrated with gender inequalities, and each advocating a radically different solution. The flatpack arrives without any of those labels.

There is the pink pill: the feminine counterpart to the manosphere’s red pill, a constellation of content telling women that feminism has failed them and that their best strategy is to maximize traditional femininity, whether through “divine femininity,” hypergamy dating strategy, or romantic submission as a tactic. Kay identifies it as the femosphere’s resignification of the red pill, a form of consciousness-raising about the supposed natural basis of inequality with a female-centric twist. It overlaps with tradwife content and soft-life content simultaneously, which is part of the problem, and part of the point I am making. The same scroll that serves you rest-as-resistance will, three swipes later, serve you submission-as-strategy. The algorithm reads both as “women interested in alternatives to feminism.” They are not the same alternative. The delivery system does not care.

There is the productivity aesthetic: the broadcasted morning routine, the 5 AM club, the aestheticized discipline of journals and smoothie bowls and gratitude lists. It is hustle culture repackaged in a wellness skin, #Girlboss in athleisure. The criticism writes itself, except that for many women it genuinely works as a structure, which is what makes the flatpack so effective. A thing does not have to be intellectually coherent to be practically useful, and a thing that is practically useful is almost impossible to critique, because the critique sounds like you are arguing against someone’s morning. I am not arguing against anyone’s morning. I am noting that the morning has been monetized, and that the monetization is where the philosophy stops and the product begins.

There is the wellness and fitness industrial complex: the $6.8 trillion global economy of gut health and cold plunges and breathwork and supplements and retreats, much of it stripped from the healing practices of colonized and non-Western peoples and resold without attribution at a markup. The criticism is not that none of it works. Some of it does. The criticism is that the delivery system cannot distinguish between what heals and what sells, and it is not designed to. And the American wellness landscape is not made to “heal” anyone, but to perhaps stave off symptoms. Its aim is to aid you in the perpetual pursuit of self-development, or the “you are not good enough” anxiety and sell you a remedy that may work for you (if you’re a good person. Oh, you’re not a good person? I have just the retreat for you). This flatpack is the oldest and the largest, and it has been running the same play since long before TikTok existed: identify an insecurity, package a solution, and now charge a subscription. The others learned from it.

There is girl math: the 2023 TikTok trend in which women humorously rationalize spending money. Anything under five dollars is free, a purchase return is income, if you paid months ago the vacation is free now and so on. It was brought to the forefront by the women behind New Zealand's ZM breakfast show, went viral when it hit TikTok, and quickly drew criticism for reinforcing the stereotype that women are financially illiterate. As Fortune framed it, the trend may be less a delusion than proof that a generation of women is starting to believe money is not real. The flatpack labeled humor contained a live wire, and the wire landed on women already earning sixty-five cents on the dollar, already less likely to be taken seriously in conversations about money, already absorbing the message from every direction that their relationship to spending is a personality trait rather than a structural position.

And there is the 4B movement: no marriage, no dating, no sex, no childbirth. Four refusals, originating in South Korea around 2015 in response to endemic gender-based violence, a gender pay gap of thirty-one percent, spy-cam pornography, a government that cut domestic violence funding and removed “gender equality” from school curricula. After Trump’s 2024 reelection, American women adopted it almost overnight. Millions of TikTok views in forty-eight hours. The South Korean context was not included in the shipment. What arrived was the refusal, without the conditions that produced it, without the years of organizing underneath it, without the understanding that the movement had no official leadership and that its participants called themselves anonymous women for a reason. An entire feminist praxis, flatpacked. And then, inevitably, debated as though it were a lifestyle choice rather than a political response to a specific country’s specific failures.

And then there is moving abroad. The belief, amplified by an algorithm that learned in 2020 exactly which images hold your attention, that relocating your body to where the beautiful photographs were taken will produce the feelings the photographs evoke. The 'Blaxit movement,' a term coined in 2016 and reclaimed during the pandemic to describe Black Americans leaving the US entirely, is the gender-inclusive version of this flatpack, and it fits here too. Moving abroad is, in my estimation, the most consequential of these flatpacks, because it is the only one that requires you to dismantle your actual life and rebuild it somewhere else, and the instructions are still not in the box. I will spend the second half of this essay on it.

Each of these movements contains something real. A genuine grievance, a legitimate desire, a defensible refusal. Each of them also arrives on your phone stripped of its context, its history, and its costs, optimized for engagement, and presented as a lifestyle you can adopt by Tuesday if you just really commit. The algorithm does not distinguish between the philosophy and the aesthetic of the philosophy. It serves whichever version you are most likely to tap.

Black Girl Soft Life sits in the middle of this ecosystem, and it touches nearly all of them. It shares an ancestor with the tradwife’s rejection of hustle culture, though it arrives from the opposite direction and for entirely different reasons. It overlaps with wellness content and gets tangled in pink-pill femininity discourse. It has been used to narrate girl-math spending and to justify moving abroad. It is the catalyst, in my estimation, that got a specific population of women looking at the exit of voluntary migration in the first place. And it has a lineage that predates every movement I just named by decades, which is the part the flatpack never includes.

So let me unpack it.

What is Black Girl Soft Life?

The phrase comes out of Nigerian online culture, derived from the Yoruba jaiye, roughly enjoy life, and the pidgin use of soft to mean ease. Andscape, covering it as a live phenomenon in September 2022, traced it to the Nigerian influencer community as slang for a life of comfort and low stress. At its root, it was not luxury, and it was not laziness. It was a decision that rest and ease, and peace do not have to be earned through suffering first, which is a pointed thing to say in any culture that treats female hardship and suffering as a virtue.

Then TikTok carried it everywhere, and the British-Nigerian writer Precious Mayowa Agbabiaka wrote in August 2022² making the point that as the term gained traction in the US and UK it began shedding its original meaning, drifting from ease and low stress toward luxury, wealth, and product. The maxim became a mood board on Pinterest, a curated Instagram grid, an Amazon storefront—link in bio. That drift is the flatpack in action: the philosophy compressed, the context stripped, the assembly left to the consumer. What arrived in the American feed was not what left Nigeria.

However, the sentiment underneath the productization landed. It landed on the exhausted, disillusioned bodies of Black women across the diaspora. It landed, especially, on Black American women who had survived the girlboss decade and were still absorbing its knock-on effects.

Girlboss was coined in 2014 by Sophia Amoruso, riding in on the same wave as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and the whole power-posing gospel of the era. For a moment it felt like something: a woman ambitious and unapologetic, building an empire, leaning all the way in. By 2020 the edifice was on fire. Girlboss-branded companies were being exposed for the cultures inside them, the racial “reckoning” of that summer revealed the movement as overwhelmingly white, and pandemic burnout made relentless ambition feel less like empowerment and more like a hostage situation.

Take Refinery29, a publication that told women to ask for more money, ran the personal finance content, and published on self-care. Sixty current and former employees spoke to CNN. Twenty-seven said they were underpaid or blocked from raises. Twenty-three said the traffic demands kept them chained to their desks. Black staff were about eleven percent of the company. All four founders were white women.

Women of color had been building careers and businesses without safety nets or venture capital or magazine covers for decades. Then we watched a word evoke a long held aspiration packaged as a white woman’s lifestyle brand, then watched the brand collapse, and got to absorb the collapse too. Underneath all of it sat the belief that a skinny jeans and a blazer, a bold lip, a cute hair-do, a fedora (for whatever reason), funky glasses and enough mentorship could out-manoeuvre a system built to keep us out of the funding rooms in the first place, and the particular type of disillusionment that arrives when you finally understand that it cannot. Bootstrap rhetoric in millennial pink.

So when the world came to a stop in 2020, less so in the US, and soft life arrived via doomscroll saying you do not have to suffer to be worthy, it did not land on Black women as a trend. It landed as articulated desire. It landed as a permission slip we had been denied twice over. Once by an extractive economic system in which Black women working full time were paid sixty-five cents for every dollar paid to white non-Hispanic men in 2024, against seventy-seven cents for white non-Hispanic women, in a gap that has now widened two years running, an unprecedented widening. And denied once more by the movement that was supposed to liberate us from all that, the feminized version of crush it culture.

What I am positing, in this essay and at every dinner party that will have me, is that even knowing the full commercial arc of the phrase, Black Girl Soft Life is not exclusively luxury, and it is emphatically not laziness. It is something both much more expansive and specific. It encompasses the rest, productivity hacks, the therapy tools (not speech), the sweet treat, the meal prep, the staying home and reading a book, the going out for “the plot”, the mending of clothes, the shopping spree— it is a universe of self-determinative choices of which I trust Black women to choose for their ease, their delight, their indulgence, etc. All of these, and more. But underneath the variety, there is a principle.

Black Girl Soft Life is the deliberate reduction of friction in a life that has had far too much of it. It is the removal of unnecessary hardness. It is the refusal to earn rest through suffering first. It is the rejection of the idea that enduring for as long as possible is noble, let alone the road to a beautiful life.

There is a line long attributed to Nina Simone:³ the people that built their heaven on your land are telling you yours is in the sky. She was naming the old arrangement: dominion secured here, reward deferred to the hereafter. The same deferral that ran through how Christianity was weaponized under slavery and reappears, secularized, in hustle culture’s promise that the grind now buys the ease later. That genealogy deserves more room than this essay can give it, and it will surely get that in a future essay. Here it is enough to say that soft life refuses the deferral. It insists heaven is available now.

It includes, crucially, a reclamation of labor. Or at the very least an attempt at one. The insistence that a Black woman’s time, attention, and energy belong to her, that the direction of her own labor is not a luxury but a right, and that the withdrawal of that labor from systems and people and dynamics that extract without replenishing is not abdication. It is a decision. This will matter later in this essay when we get to Reconstruction, because the charge against Black women who made exactly this decision in the 1860s was not that they had stopped working. It was that they had stopped working for the people who had been watching, and who had previously been enriched by their work.

And the shape of that refusal is almost never what the vision boards relay. The choices Black women make in pursuit of a soft life are rarely a matter of the mall versus the library. They look like deciding not to play workplace politics, knowing full well it stalls your climb, and finding contentment in the knowing. They look like opting out of a harmful family dynamic that will get you cast as the villain, and deciding that peace of mind and self-respect are a fair trade, even when the price is seeing family rarely, or not at all. These are not soft decisions. They are decisions in pursuit of softness, and the distinction is crucial.

Black Girl Soft Life can be practiced alone. In fact, it is, in most of its truest forms, practiced alone, much the way boundaries are. Because boundaries are ultimately for you, not for the other person. The refusal to earn rest through suffering is a boundary. The reclamation of your own labor and attention is a boundary. And the practice of it does not require anyone else’s permission, participation, or approval. That is its power and, as I will argue, its ceiling.

It becomes an aesthetic when it is photographed and distributed and liked and collected. It becomes an embodiment, and therefore transformative, when it is practiced: the giving up of ill-fitting expectations that may never have been yours, the commitment to cultivating an honest and soothing life in whatever form that takes for you, offline, in the actual living of it. Stepping off the ladder, or making peace with your rung. Quitting the race, or adopting a tortoise’s pace. Deciding to live in heaven now, not as indulgence but as birthright, as reclamation, maybe as subversion.

I enjoy the “aesthetic”, as the youth would say, though the word properly names a branch of philosophy concerned with beauty and taste, and has been flattened online into a synonym for a type of appearance or look or flatter still, visually appealing. Black Girl Soft Life is aesthetically pleasing, for sure. But consumption is not metabolism. You can repost, pin, or buy a thing without it ever becoming part of you.

And it is a universe of choice, not a single script. Pick your player. Pick your ending. Which is precisely why it needs sharper internal definition rather than another defense or dismissal: because a universe with no map is one where everybody assumes they are standing in the same place, and no one actually is.

Continuation of a Lineage, Not a Trend

Black Girl Soft Life provokes visceral reactions in everyday people and academics alike. The observations, critiques, conflations, and counter-arguments range from the innocuous to the venomous, and whether you call any given one honest or dishonest is largely a matter of positionality, taste, and belief, so I will leave you to make your own evaluations.

The bad-faith version treats any Black woman’s desire for ease as a moral failure. Consumerism dressed up as self-care. Ancestors taken off the altar and replaced with a bath bomb. And these accusations, aimed at women and at Black women in particular, have far deeper roots than the current discourse.

Because the sins were never weighed evenly. The ones that draw the most disgust when a woman commits them are the ones coded feminine: vanity, appetite, the wanting of nice things. Meanwhile greed and lust in a man get waved through as the nature of the beast, the cost of doing business, boys being boys. A man who wants more is ambitious. A woman who wants more is an ambitious bitch. A woman who wants ease is weak, or lazy, or decadent. And a Black woman who wants all of it, and gets it, is met with suspicion about how she came by it, accusations of temerity, and a general sense that her existence constitutes a whole crisis. (The theology underneath this, Eve first and worst, the female body as the origin of the fall, has a long paper trail, and I follow it properly in a future academic article.)

I do not accept the framework. And I would gently point out that much of the hand-wringing over soft life, the insistence that Black women be permanently in service to something higher, some collective, some struggle, some family, is the oldest demand on earth wearing a critical-theory hat. That our labor, physical and emotional, stay available to everyone but us. We are one of the only groups consistently fed that line and told that it is love.

Some critics say soft life surfaced because of present conditions, and there is truth in that. But the concept is the newest articulation of an established lineage, not a novelty. I said in the previous section that the flatpack never includes the assembly instructions. Here are the instructions. They are nearly a century old.

When I first started trying to name what I was noticing, which really means thinking out loud at friends who willingly or unwillingly became a sounding board, a dear friend pointed me to Audre Lorde. Lorde, dying of liver cancer, wrote in A Burst of Light (1988) that caring for herself was not self-indulgence but self-preservation, and therefore an act of political warfare. She was not talking about a face mask, or crystals, or a matcha latte. Although all of those things are nice. She was talking about staying alive inside a system built to kill her early, and she compared the work of anti-Black racism directly to the cancer attacking her own cells, the body turning against itself under the world’s pressure.

There is a name now for what Lorde was describing before the research caught up to her. Dr. Arline Geronimus calls it weathering: the accumulated physiological cost of living inside chronic stress, discrimination, and scarcity, which wears the body down at the cellular level and ages it faster. So although Black don’t crack, our physiology and cells do. Geronimus has been building the evidence since 1992 and gathered it into her acclaimed 2023 book of the same name. Not metaphorically. Measurably. Black women in the United States carry a documented biological receipt for what the US has done to them and continues to ask of them.

Which reframes the entire argument. If the harm is physiological, then rest is not indulgence and it is not a mood. It is intervention. And if it is intervention, then the question is not whether Black women deserve softness, which is a moral question with an obvious answer, but what softness actually does to the body, which is a physiological question with an empirical one. Lorde said caring for herself was political warfare and people heard poetry. She was also, it turns out, describing a mechanism. That mechanism, allostatic load and its potential reversal, is something I return to at the end of this essay, and something I explore at length in the essay on Migration as Wellness, because it turns out the conditions under which weathering may stop, and even may begin to reverse, map almost exactly onto the distinction I am drawing between soft life and what comes after it.

bell hooks gave it a whole book. Sisters of the Yam (1993) names Black women’s self-recovery as liberatory political practice and insists that choosing wellness is itself political.

This is the soil soft life grows in, whether its critics know the genealogy or not. And it is alive in my own archive, a primary oral history collection of life-history interviews with Black women living abroad, spanning migration experiences in 50+ countries, recorded since 2020. In her 2023 episode, Dr. Nafeesah Allen, a Black American woman living in Peru at the time of recording, reached explicitly for Lorde, telling me the things she once thought of as luxuries are “not about Luxe, they are about self-preservation, the self care needed to get up and produce and mother and live.” Or Juanita Ingram, in 2021, living in Singapore at the time of recording, describing what she called her whole campaign: normalizing black women in luxury, black women in self care, black women in wellness, black women in tenderness. “Can we be soft? Can we relax? Can we have tenderness in our lives and be treated tenderly?”

That is not solely consumerism, though I will grant the American marketplace its almost unique gift for extracting the profound and reissuing it as brightly colored plastic consumer product. Primary colors for children. Pastel colors for women (who appreciate wellness). Dark colors for men (who are manly). I know the marketplace intimately, because I sell in it: I am a business strategist, and one of my past products is a concept I remain frankly obsessed with, soft life, soft business, the idea that the thing you build to sustain yourself should not weather you, which I explored at length in an episode of the show. I name that now so you know I am inside the kitchen where some of this sausage gets made, not lobbing critiques from the parking lot.

So this is, at the very least, a generations-old argument about who gets to be a full human being, and soft life is its newest expression, arriving in a form so visually compelling it drives engagement and flattens ideology onto a hashtag.

Juanita had left an exemplary legal career, two bar admissions, a JD and an MBA, to follow her husband’s postings to the UK, Taiwan, and Singapore. She raised her children abroad, and produced her own reality television show. People told her she was crazy. Her answer has stayed with me for years:

I do feel comfortable being a kept woman. Keep me. I want an easy life. I want to be tender. I want to be loved. There’s nothing wrong with going through a season of being cared for. Our white counterparts are permitted seasons of sitting back and exploring their other talents and gifts. But when we do it, we have to take on the burden of, but where is the labor?

But where is the labor?

Female Loaferism

The friction between what Black women do, what we are told we should do, and how to do it, is an American friction with a real history. I learn most of my history from Black women doing serious intellectual work in every format, so credit where it is owed: Alandya Warren, @ebonyarchival on TikTok. Yes, social media, that great flattener of nuance, can also be the seedling of further inquiry, if your FYP is aligned accordingly. My doomscrolling is not always educational, but it is reliably informative.

During Reconstruction (1865–1877), freed Black women who directed their own time and labor instead of working for wages in white households were charged with the evil of female loaferism. The revolutionary writer Butch Lee, in Jailbreak Out of History, reads it for what it was: a massive unofficial labor strike that threw the planter class into a panic. Historians of the period, Tera Hunter and Thavolia Glymph among them, document the same withdrawal and the same coercive response: the vagrancy provisions, the Black Codes, the laws that made an unsupervised Black woman's hours into a crime.

What those women were actually doing, of course, was working. In their own homes, on their own land, for their own families, raising their own children instead of somebody else’s. And in a great number of cases removing themselves from the specific physical danger that domestic proximity to white households carried, the sexual harassment and assault that Hunter and Glymph both document. The labor did not disappear. It was redirected. What disappeared was its visibility to the people who had previously owned it, and the visibility, then as now, turned out to be the part that mattered.

Notice what the response was not. It was not a wage negotiation. It was legislation, and then it was an entire legal architecture, from the Black Codes through convict leasing and into Jim Crow, dedicated to ensuring that Black bodies could be located, accounted for, and compelled. A whole century of law built around the problem of a Black woman whose whereabouts and hours were her own business.

Not because the women were idle. Black women have never been idle. What was criminalized was self-determination, the self-direction of one’s own labor, and the ferocity of the response measured exactly how dangerous an ungoverned Black woman’s time was understood to be.

But where is the labor?

Juanita’s question, asked from Singapore in 2021 about her white counterparts’ permission to rest, is the same question the planter class was asking in 1866. Different century, different continent, same suspicion. A Black woman not visibly producing is a Black woman about whom conclusions will be drawn. The charge never was idleness. The charge was the absence of visible performance. And the performance was always for an audience that believed it was entitled to the product.

I defined Black Girl Soft Life in the previous section as including a reclamation of labor. This is where that definition meets its history. The decisions I described, opting out of workplace politics, withdrawing from extractive family dynamics, practicing a boundary alone in the quiet of your own living, those are the contemporary shapes of what those freed women practiced when they turned their labor toward their own households. The vocabulary changed. The accusation did not.

The term female loaferism is explicitly derogatory and I am not arguing for its reclamation, although if somebody made a female loaferism shirt I cannot promise I will not buy it. What intrigues me is the subversiveness of the thing being punished. Black women not visibly laboring became suspicious. Black women self-determining their labor became a threat requiring legislation. The absence of visible performance was itself the offense.

Toddre’ Monier gave the archive its clearest statement of what sits underneath all this, recording from Nairobi in 2023, where she was caring for her elderly mother. Black American women, she said, are a people descended from women who were domestics, who were forced to work. She thinks about her grandmother, a domestic; her grandmother’s mother, who ran her own side hustles; her grandfathers in the steel mill. They did the work so she would not have to, so she could go to law school one day. And there, she told me, a white American friend who was cleaning rooms at a local motel to make ends meet in law school tried to talk her into joining, then looked at her a certain way when she declined. So you think you’re too good for it, was the implication. Toddre’s answer: “I’m like, no, my grandmothers did that for me. That’s not a path that I need to go down.”

For some of us, refusing to reproduce the conditions of our foremothers’ extraction is not abdication. It is ancestral veneration. Black Girl Soft Life, at its truest, is the descendant of the very decisions that got maligned as female loaferism, the absurd and unfounded charge of laziness, and I believe it is most potent when nobody is watching, when it is not being performed for anyone at all. When the boundary is being practiced, not announced.

Which is also, unfortunately, where it starts getting complicated.

The Pin, the Post and the TikTok Video

An honest critique of soft life is not really a critique of soft life as a maxim or a philosophy. It is a critique of the confusion the social media feed manufactures and then sells back to us. I have spent the first half of this essay defending the concept and tracing its lineage. Now it’s time to give its critics their due.

Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, whose Too Heavy a Yoke named the StrongBlackWoman archetype years before any of this trended, has written that soft life made her bristle from the first, because she kept meeting it as posts about financial privilege, marrying for money, and a femininity fixated on appearance and romance, with often white influencers at the helm. She applauds the boundaries, the rest, the learning to say no. She objects to the turn. And she thinks the turn was inevitable, because of how it was framed in the first place: as a life without stress. A life without friction.

EbonyJanice reframes rather than scolds, asking the question: who would Black women get to be if we did not have to create from a place of resistance?

These are the serious critiques, and I take them onboard. Now here is mine.

I have been saying this on my own mic for years. Soft life is not a practice of collecting or generating pretty imagery. It is an embodiment and a cultivation.

The image does something real for you psychologically, a visual antidote to a lifetime in which Black women were either absent from the frame or in it only as hard, strong, laboring, and invulnerable. I want more of it. Keep it coming. But the collection of images is not the life anyone is actually seeking. What is being sought is the feeling the images evoke, and the beliefs they are taken to represent. I said in the flatpack section that the algorithm does not distinguish between the philosophy and the aesthetic of the philosophy. This is where that indistinction does its damage.

I made the case in the flatpack section that the wellness industry identifies insecurities and sells remedies. Watch what happens when that same logic gets applied to rest itself.

Kelley Bonner, a licensed therapist, past guest, and host of Black Girl Burnout, frames softness as the discipline of choosing what to opt out of and what to opt into, a definition that asks something of you. A fantasy tells you the work is unnecessary, that the life is one purchase away. Notice how cleanly that maps onto what I said about boundaries: a boundary practiced is a discipline. A boundary announced is a performance. The feed rewards the announcement. The life rewards the practice.

Which brought me to E. Franklin Frazier, the famed sociologist and first African American president of the American Sociological Association, who saw the mechanism nearly seventy years ago in Black Bourgeoisie: a class mistaking the ability to buy the markers of dignity for dignity itself, a whole world of make-believe propped up by conspicuous consumption.

It is the conflation of consumption with embodiment, the confusion I named in the definition: you can buy a thing without it ever becoming part of you. The softness Lorde and hooks described was always communal and resource-dependent. hooks’s entire prescription in Sisters of the Yam ends by pointing you toward arms that can hold you. Toward people, not products. The commodified version does the reverse. It makes softness individual, purchasable, solitary. A woman alone with her matcha, performing a peace she has not been given the conditions to actually feel. Or a subscription community whose members’ only shared ground is that they like the same aesthetic, shop the same places, follow the same diet, and can afford the fee.

And when that confusion gets fused to something as disruptive as international migration, it stops being a marketplace problem and becomes a life-altering one.

The Imaginary and the Plane Ticket

And now, finally, back to migration.

I said in the flatpack section that moving abroad is the most consequential of the algorithmic lifestyle exports, because it is the only one that requires you to dismantle your actual life and rebuild it somewhere else.

There is a body of work in the anthropology of tourism I find useful here, on what the anthropologists Noel Salazar and Nelson Graburn call tourism imaginaries. Their argument is that it is nearly impossible to imagine tourism without the seductive and restrictive imaginaries we hold about peoples and places, that these are not private daydreams but socially shared assemblages, produced and consumed collaboratively, and that they function as the mechanism by which a place becomes a credible object of tourism. A place has to be imagined before it can be visited. Somebody has to do the imagining. Their framework was built for tourism, but the mechanism maps directly onto voluntary migration: a place imagined, a lifestyle projected onto it, and a decision made on the strength of the projection. The difference is that a tourist goes home. A migrant has to live inside the gap between what was imagined and what is actually there.

Now the somebody is an algorithm full of travel influencers and move-abroad influencers and expat influencers. Never migrant influencers. The language itself is a flatpack: expat arrives without the disruption that migrant carries, and the softer word lets the viewer skip the part where her life falls apart and gets rebuilt, which is the part that matters.

I live in Valencia and have for five of my nine years in Spain. I did not arrive because of a feed. I studied here in 2007, I had a friend here, I visited, I liked it. But by the time I moved in 2021, Valencia had been topping these “Best Cities” rankings for years. InterNations, an expat community that surveys tens of thousands of people annually on quality of life, cost of living, ease of settling in, and career prospects, named it the number one city in the world for foreign residents in 2022, third in 2023, and first again in 2024. Alicante and Lisbon and Málaga were right there with it. I did not arrive ahead of the imaginary. I arrived alongside it, and then watched it thicken around me.

In the year Valencia ranked first overall, first for quality of life and first for cost of living, it ranked forty-first out of fifty for Working Abroad. Dead last for career prospects. The best city in the world to arrive in, and one of the worst in which to build a working life. That gap is not a flaw in the ranking. It is a signal about precisely for whom Valencia constitutes a first-rate quality of life, and that person is someone whose income is generated somewhere else.

The listicles and the blogs and the vlogs and the images are not about that. Instagrammability, now an actual term in the tourism literature, functions as a primary driver of destination choice, in some studies outweighing other motivations entirely, and the mechanism underneath it is what researchers call social return: the anticipated positive feedback on the post about the trip. People are selecting destinations partly for how the reaction to the photograph will feel. Which, if you have been tracking the argument about performance and embodiment, means the destination choice is itself being made for an audience. The location is selected for the image it will produce. The image is produced for the reaction it will generate. And the life is supposed to be built inside the gap between what was photographed and what is actually there.

The timing is worth being precise about, because it explains the mechanism rather than merely asserting a coincidence. The move-abroad content came first, in the long American summer of 2020, when leaving was something you could look at but not yet do, and algorithmic feeds became a mental substitute for physical movement. Soft life crested a year or two behind it. By 2022 the two were braided together in the same feed, served to the same women by the same algorithm, at precisely the moment the borders reopened. The fantasy of the destination and the fantasy of the life arrived separately, and then they fused. This is what I meant by calling soft life the catalyst: it was the emotional fuel that made the conditional opportunity of voluntary migration look like a door rather than what it actually is, which is a passage into disruption.

So you get a combustible convergence. The liking and collecting of images is not dangerous. A vision board is a genuine and worthy pleasure, and I have made several. What is combustible is the collision. American disillusionment plus aspiration plus a curated visual field plus a platform that has learned exactly which images hold your attention, and then, underneath all of it, a belief that the feelings the images produce in you can be obtained by relocating your body to where the images were taken.

Look, Christine lives in Spain. She is on the beach on a Saturday morning with a book, sitting with Black elders, soaking it up, building a whole professional life out of a podcast. Something happened to her there. And it can happen to me there too.

Perhaps you think that about me now that I’ve shared that story. But not before, because I don’t post my life on social media.

I do not say this to claim any superiority. If anything it sharpens the point about my own positionality, and about who has access to what. My mother visited Spain before I ever did, in the late nineties and early two-thousands, with her girlfriends. My high school graduation gift was a trip around Spain with other teenagers. I studied abroad in Valencia in 2007. I walked the Camino de Santiago Francés across the country in 2014. When I moved to Spain in 2017, I met a now-dear friend at a Black women’s brunch hosted by the now-shuttered Las Morenas de España. She had just landed in Valencia and invited me down to visit, and I went. She is the one I consulted when I decided to leave Barcelona for Valencia in 2021. However I feel about my own path, it was privileged in its access to trips and opportunities and network, in a way that never required social media as the catalyst. But social media has undeniably worked as a global connector, carrying everything from uprisings broadcast in real time to concerts streamed across the world into the same feed. And into that feed, for a specific set of women at a specific moment, came a specific fantasy.

I have watched what that fantasy produces when it meets the ground. In Lisbon, where I spent time as an artist in residence and where I will begin doctoral work this fall, I have watched Black American women arrive into an already established Black ecosystem, drawn by the imaginary of a Black-friendly European capital, and interface with that ecosystem in ways that range from the deeply generative to the quietly extractive. I have watched women arrive without language, without a plan for integration, without a clear answer to the most basic question anyone who runs a community for “expats” will ask, which is why did you move here? I have watched the organizers who build community for these women, absorb the emotional and logistical weight of arrivals who were, as community leaders put it, sold a dream. The dream was sold by podcasts and YouTubers and social media creators who will tell you what you want to hear for a click, a like, a following.

What they will not tell you is that Portugal is Portugal. It speaks Portuguese. Its systems are slow and its bureaucracy requires patience. The cheap apartment that was promised turns out to be an hour outside Lisbon with limited public transportation. That is not the imaginary you were shown. And the already-present Black community, the Afro-Portuguese and Afro-Brazilian and African populations whose presence was part of what drew you, has its own history, its own struggles, its own relationship to the state, and its own reasonable feelings about being treated as scenery in someone else’s soft-life montage.

Again, I am not making a moral judgment. I am naming a pattern, because the pattern has consequences that extend beyond the individual who packed the suitcase. Migration is disruptive. I have said it on the show since 2020. It is disruptive to you, to the people you left, and to the ecosystem you entered. And a disruption undertaken on the strength of a flatpacked fantasy, without intentionality, without clarity about your own motivations, without even rudimentary knowledge of the place you are entering, is not soft life. It is not even relief. It is a relocation of disembodiment, and the place you arrive in will feel the weight of it before you do.

I do not judge the motivation. It is a conclusion drawn from the only evidence most people are given: the evidence the algorithm selected. I think it is understandable, and for Black American women specifically I think it is close to rational, given what the conditions in the United States actually do to the body over time. But for Black Girl Soft Life to be impactful, it has to move from aesthetic to embodiment, and the same surface engagement that hollows out the wellness industry is fully at play here. The belief that you will be intrinsically better on a Spanish terraza with a copa de vino tinto at ten at night is misguided at best. It is a lovely experience and worth having; I have had it many times over many summers. However, it is not, on its own, well-being. It is an imaginary that most people encountered through a screen, or perhaps once as a tourist, and are now attempting to move into permanently. Making an inherently disruptive decision, one that may alter the course of a lineage, on the strength of content created to satisfy an algorithm, in an environment where veracity checks do not exist.

What the Women Actually Said

Somewhere around season five, I started asking every guest on Flourish in the Foreign what she made of Black Girl Soft Life. What she thought it was. Whether she was living one. Whether she wanted to be. I asked it of every guest across two seasons, women scattered across continents and countries.

One of these days I will make a compilation episode out of the answers. Not soon, but it is in the mental queue. The responses sorted themselves into three camps. There were women who knew the term, resonated with it completely, and delighted in the language. There were women who had never encountered it, or had and could take it or leave it. And there were women adamantly opposed, who found it juvenile and consumerist and unserious.

Three camps. Real disagreement. And then here is what happened every single time, in all three, almost without exception, the moment a woman stopped evaluating the phrase and started describing her actual life.

She described self-determination. Over her pace. Over her environment. Over how she spent her time, what her labor produced, who ate from it, and what any of it meant.

Tiandra took the term but bent it clean away from the mood board. She resonated with Black Girl Soft Life, she told me, “but in a means of a different context as maybe others may.” And then she described what it actually meant to her, and there was no lavender in it. It was permission to fall apart: “it is okay to fall apart when you feel like you can’t hold on anymore… there is a soft landing for you in that moment.” It was the right to decline: “I’m tired today. I’m not interested in that… I had a long week and it’s Saturday and I have nothing to do. I’m going to completely lay in my bed and do absolutely nothing and rest because I need to.” And underneath all of it, the thing so many of them named without prompting, a whole life of being called strong: “I’m strong because I have to be. But I don’t wanna be.”

That is the preliminary finding. The woman who loved the term and the woman who found it embarrassing were describing more or less the same life, in their own bespoke language, disagreeing about vocabulary while agreeing about substance. Which means the real line is not between Black women who migrated for a soft life and Black women who migrated for something more serious or more respectable. There is no such border. There is a spectrum, and these women are standing at different points along it, reaching for whichever word was nearest to hand.

I think that is why the term generates so much heat. It is doing far less work than the behavior underneath it, and everyone can feel the mismatch without being able to articulate it. People grasp for language when they land somewhere new and the pressure lifts, and the words they grab are almost always too big. Relief gets called freedom. A nervous system settling gets called liberation. A phase gets called a personality. I built an entire framework in part because the available vocabulary was failing the women who were trying to use it, and they knew it was failing them, and they could not figure out where.

Photo Credit: Pexels | Arina Krasnikova

A Graduation

So here is what happened to me on that spectrum, offered as one woman’s data point and not as a prescription.

I moved to Spain in 2017, burnt out without the word for burnout. I told everybody I just needed a break, a break I imagined would last one or two years at most. That was nine years ago next month. In 2014, incidentally, I told people I just needed a long walk, and then walked five hundred miles of the Camino de Santiago Francés. Glean from that what you will.

My first year I was a teaching assistant in La Rioja working twelve hours a week, tutoring on the side at an academy that delighted in my American accent, drinking wine so good and so cheap it was almost obscene, lushy lunches turning into impromptu dinner parties. On the surface, the softest of lives. Underneath, I was not “healed” and I was not actually soft. I was living a boozy life, still fully programmed with American productivity and American guilt, in a smooth frictionless ease that skimmed right over everything. Smooth like glass. About as much friction as a non-multimillionaire adult can arrange for herself.

I needed that. I am not ashamed of it and I will not pathologize it in you either. When you arrive somewhere new, especially coming out of somewhere that was actively harming you, you need to regulate. Sleep. Let the nervous system register the changed conditions. Sort out the basic rhythms of a life in a place less hostile than the last one. That period of softness is necessary and it is doing real work. In the language of the allostatic research I cited earlier, what is happening in this phase is Tier 1 recovery: cortisol baseline begins to drop, sleep architecture normalizes, the body starts to register that the chronic stressor has stopped. That is not a metaphor for relief. It is relief, measured.

What the research also suggests, and what I explore in the Migration as Wellness essay, is that the most powerful input for actual recovery is not sleep or exercise but perceived social safety: belonging, being understood, existing in low threat. That is communal, not individual, and it is why the sumptuous life cannot be practiced alone.

It is just not the destination that I think a great many Black women online are reaching for as the pinnacle. And I lived in it for about three years before I understood that.

And this, I owe to Dr. Walker-Barnes, who arrived at the same door from the opposite direction. She said the commodification was inevitable because Black Girl Soft Life had been framed as a life without friction. She is right, and it costs me something to say so, because I have spent this entire essay defending the concept she was bristling at. A life organized around the absence of stress will always be purchasable, because the absence of stress can be simulated, photographed, and sold. A life organized around the capacity for texture cannot be, because capacity has to be built and nobody can build it for you.

So let me name what I think a great many of us are actually reaching toward.

I call it the Black Girl Sumptuous Life.

Black Girl Sumptuous Life is not the absence of friction. It is the cultivated capacity for it. Not a plant in survival mode, stripped to its minimum functions, conserving energy against the next crisis. A plant whose root system has grown deep enough and whose internal systems are healthy enough to weather the occasional storm without going flying, because the soil is good and the ecosystem sustains it. The hypervigilance does not lift because you changed your zip code. It lifts through rootedness, through community, through the slow accumulation of evidence that this ground will hold.

It is rootedness rather than lightness.

It is textured rather than smooth.

It is communal rather than solitary.

It is chosen rather than demanded, which is the whole of what separates it from endurance.

It is what becomes possible after the softness has done its work.

Think about velvet. Run your hand fast against the nap and you may get rug burn. Velvet is not for sudden movements. It is for the slow graze, the finger pads underneath moving with the fiber, and the sumptuousness lives in knowing how to move against it. Or think about the last genuinely extraordinary meal you ate, where the miracle was almost never some ingredient you had never heard of. It was the handling. Sour and sweet and bitter and fat and salt and umami, combined by somebody with technique into something you could not have assembled yourself out of the same components. A life that is only sweet gets tiring fast and nobody has a palate for it indefinitely. The sumptuous life takes the bitter and the sour, appreciates them, and makes them delicious.

I have been asked whether this is just endurance in prettier clothes, the StrongBlackWoman myth with a manicure, and I welcome the pushback, so let me answer directly. No. That myth is the lie that we can handle anything, that endurance is our gift and suffering our inheritance, and it is imposed from outside without consent. The sumptuous life is the voluntary cultivation of the capacity to navigate complexity, undertaken because you have chosen a life rich enough to require it and rewarding enough to deserve it. Endurance is demanded of you. This you build.

And it is not an individual pursuit, which is the second thing separating it from where it came from. The sumptuousness is in the rootedness. It is having enough well-being and enough ground under you that exploration outside yourself becomes something you can handle and something you actively want. A soft life can be practiced alone in a flat with the blinds down. This cannot. That is not a weakness in the definition. It is the definition.

Black Girl Sumptuous Life sits on a spectrum. Its beginning can be at migration as wellness, the point at which the frictionless bubble pops and you start doing the harder, slower work of actually rooting: learning the language, getting outside the expat enclosure, building real relationship with the people and the place. It expands through migration as liberation, when the transformation is no longer only internal but extends to how you relate to power, to community, to the society you entered. And it should be integral to migration as Black futurity, the horizon I am still mapping, where the question is no longer what am I building for myself but what conditions am I building that will sustain flourishing beyond me.

Soft life buys you the conditions for recovery. It does not produce the recovery, and it cannot, on its own, produce whatever comes after. That has to be built, sometimes over years, and more often than we admit it has to be built for each other, because the world as currently arranged would very much prefer that none of us rest at all.

Which is why I keep coming back to that Saturday on the sand.

Nothing about that morning was frictionless. I had gotten myself up before five. Huffed and puffed across the city on a heavy municipal bike. I had learned enough Spanish to have a life here and not merely a series of transactions. I had built, over nine years and through one genuinely bad relationship and two cities that did not fit, deaths in my family, great business years, abysmal business years.

And on that Saturday I had built a set of conditions in which an older Black woman would sit down beside me and was offered me her whole history. She was not only resting either. She was planning to ride a bicycle across Norway, alone. That is not a soft life. But it is a sumptuous one.

Soft life is the catalyst. It is the thing that got a generation of Black women looking at exit. It is the reason many of them bought the ticket. And for all the ways the flatpack version has been stripped and marketed and sold back to us at a markup, the desire underneath it, the desire to rest, to reclaim your labor, to set a boundary for yourself and practice it in the quiet of your own living, that desire is real and it is ancient and it is right. I have defended it in this essay because I believe in it. I have complicated it because I believe it deserves more than a mood board.

So live your Black Girl Soft Life. Rest in it. Let it do the relieving and the regulating it is genuinely capable of doing, and do not let anybody, me included, shame you out of a single hour of it.

And then, when the smoothness starts to feel like a room without windows, come find me. This essay is the ground floor. The building goes up in Canon in Progress, where I take the move-abroad movement apart word by word, and where Migration as Relief, Migration as Wellness, and Migration as Liberation each get the full treatment they are owed. I have been mapping this for six years and I am nowhere near finished.

---

This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org. Bookshop.org is an online bookshop with a mission to financially support local, independent bookshops. Any purchase you make supports this work at no extra charge to you.

© 2026 Christine Job. Please cite as: Job, Christine. "On Migration and Black Girl Soft Life." Love Letters from Elsewhere, 2026.

---

Sources

Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light (1988) · bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam (1993) · Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society (2023) · Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Too Heavy a Yoke (2014) and "soft life" · Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance (2022) · Butch Lee, Jailbreak Out of History · Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom (1997) · Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage (2008) · E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (1957) · Jilly Boyce Kay, "The reactionary turn in popular feminism," Feminist Media Studies (2024) · Noel B. Salazar and Nelson H. H. Graburn, eds., Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches (Berghahn, 2014) · Precious Mayowa Agbabiaka, "Why you're probably using 'soft life' wrong," iNews (18 August 2022) · "The #SoftLife isn't as easy as it looks online," Andscape (September 2022) · National Women's Law Center on 2024 Census wage data · "Refinery29 is reeling from claims of racism and toxic work culture," CNN Business (June 2020) · Global Wellness Institute, Global Wellness Economy Monitor · InterNations Expat City Ranking, 2022, 2023, 2024 · Alandya Warren, @ebonyarchival · Flourish in the Foreign: Nafeesah Allen, Juanita Ingram, Toddre' Monier, Tiandra Burns, Kelley Bonner

1. Not her real name.

2. Precious Mayowa Agbabiaka, "Why you're probably using 'soft life' wrong," iNews, 18 August 2022.

3. Widely attributed to Simone; I have not been able to trace it to a primary source.