Romanticising your life has a new name, and it isn't delulu.
On savouring, the messy middle, and the discipline of noticing.
Delulu came out of the K-pop community and went mainstream on TikTok around 2022–2023. Somewhere in that window the meaning flipped from an insult to a self-confidence technique for women chasing something bigger than their current circumstances. In culture now, it sits close to fake it till you make it.
I’ll admit I love the sound of it. There’s something in delulu that suggests a real kind of internal confidence, the quiet certainty that you’re meant to do something. But never in the insult sense, and never in the faking sense. I’ve never believed in faking it till you make it. I believe in acting as if. That is a different thing entirely. Acting as if isn’t pretending. It’s expressing and empowering a future version of yourself into the present moment, even when the confidence isn’t fully there yet.
Which brings me to the concept that has quietly outlasted delulu: romanticising your life. It’s lasted because it’s backed by psychology. When things get messy, we romanticise, we find meaning, we find beauty in an ordinary moment despite its imperfections. The point was never to pretend everything is perfect. The point is to notice what’s good while the rest is still unfinished.
In positive psychology, there’s a name for this. The psychologist Fred Bryant calls it savouring: the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and, above all, enhance the positive experiences in our lives. Read that again: enhance. Savouring isn’t passive. It’s an active, intentional effort to make a good experience last.
Bryant’s model gives it three forms, three ways to practise it, starting now.
What's Worth Your Attention
Worth sitting with
Anticipation. Using your imagination to savour a moment before it arrives, letting yourself look forward to it, fully, rather than bracing for it.
Savouring the moment. Choosing one beautiful, meaningful thing in front of you and giving it your whole attention, as a way to block distractions.
Reminiscing. Returning to a moment after it’s passed. And here’s the part worth holding onto: sharing it amplifies it. The research is clear that telling a friend, writing it down, recalling it aloud reinforces the memory and deepens its impact. Savouring is rarely a solitary act.
This is what I mean when I talk about romanticising your life. Not the performance of a perfect one, but the discipline of noticing the meaningful one you’re already in. The details, the small things, the process itself. Because the ability to appreciate the journey, especially while it’s still messy, still incomplete, still not where you want it, is not separate from the outcome.
It’s part of how you get there.
Worth Curating
Objects for the practice of noticing, not to fill a moment but to make you feel it.
A candle with a memory attached. Scent is the most direct line to reminiscing: it returns you to a moment faster than any photograph. Choose one and burn it only in the evenings, or only on Sundays. The restraint is what makes it a ritual, not a habit.
Notes written by hand. Savouring deepens when you record it. A weighty notebook kept by the bed, not for productivity but for noting the one thing worth keeping from the day.
A good book. The kind you read slowly, on purpose.
From the salon,
— Sabina