Entergalactic and the Life You Perform Before You Live It.

On the people who buy vinyl

Entergalactic is such a beautiful film. It’s like, a playlist turned visual. The colours, the lighting, the way Kid Cudi’s music blends into the city. It captures a very specific feeling. Being young, creative, ambitious and convinced your life is cinematic. Yet, you’re confused. Incomplete.

And the thing it gets right about cities, like New York, and honestly even Nairobi in a different way, is how romance and ambition start overlapping. Your apartment, (my room) your art, your friends, your love life, your identity, it all becomes one giant aesthetic, emotional project.

My room isn’t just “my room” It’s evidence of some sort. Evidence of who I think I am. My posters, my lighting, my playlists, the mug I drink from, the books on my floor, they all feel symbolic. Same with my clothes, my friends, the places I go, even the way I speak online. Art, love, friendship, they aren’t separate categories. They all feed into the construction of my identity.

That’s why Entergalactic feels so immersive. It captures so perfectly this phase I’m in. This phase a majority of us are in. Where life feels intensely curated. Becoming who you want to be by pretending you already are.

Jabari is the clearest example. On paper, he’s succeeding. Cool apartment, creative career, attractive, socially fluent, surrounded by aesthetically pleasing people and spaces. But emotionally, he’s still deeply uncertain. He wants love, validation, artistic success, independence, intimacy; and he’s trying to balance all of them without looking needy or unstable.

And Meadow is similar. She appears composed and self-possessed, but there’s still uncertainty beneath it. She’s figuring out how to balance her vulnerability with her independence, wanting intimacy without losing herself, trying to maintain creative ambition while emotionally opening up

And I see it in all of us. This urbane adult condition. Performing identity before you truly feel it. Buying expensive records before you know what your music taste is because you want to be the kind of person who owns records. Spending hours perfecting a morning routine—matcha, journaling, meditation, Pilates—without asking whether you actually enjoy any of it. Meticulously curating a Spotify profile to communicate taste, with the hope that others will infer depth or originality. Buying a film camera because you want to be "the kind of person who notices beauty," even if most of the roll stays undeveloped. Buying ten philosophy books and leaving them artfully stacked on the bedside table but you haven’t finished a single chapter. It’s everywhere.

And my thing is, I don’t think this is hypocrisy.

I think it’s aspiration.

Sometimes we build the life before we build the self. We buy the records before we know our taste because we’re hoping taste will emerge through proximity. We decorate the apartment before we feel at home. We call ourselves writers before we’ve found our voice. We rehearse an identity until, one day, it stops feeling like rehearsal. It becomes who you are.

The danger, I think, is when we mistake the props for the person. When owning vinyl becomes a substitute for listening deeply. When the aesthetic becomes so polished that there’s no room left to discover who you actually are.

So, Jabari and Meadow are performative as fuck. But they don’t feel fake to me. They feel unfinished. They’ve already assembled the apartment, the clothes, the career, the city, the soundtrack. They’ve built lives that look coherent from the outside. But internally, they’re still negotiating who they are. Maybe that’s the real condition of modern adulthood: living one version ahead of yourself and hoping your life catches up.

THATS why the film feels so familiar. It understands that for some of us, consciousness is a spectator sport. We experience life twice: while becoming, and while watching ourselves become.

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my room, that I LOVEEEEE