I Only Threw This Party for You: On Gen Z’s Obsession With Self-Curation

By Heartscape Intern, Tan Min Wen

First released in May of 2020, Charli XCX’s party 4 u took the internet by a storm when it went viral on TikTok in early 2025. The lyrics of the song paint a picture of an elaborate party, complete with decorations, alcohol, music, and people — all the makings of a good night. But underneath all the confetti and the spectacle lies a heartbreaking, vulnerable admission: I only threw this party for you. The entire party has been constructed around the hope that one particular person would notice, and this person never shows up.

Since its virality, many have drawn parallels between the song and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In the novel, Gatsby throws lavish, extravagant parties in his mansion across the bay from her house, night after night in hopes that they will capture Daisy’s attention. And while most of us aren’t throwing parties on a regular basis, the reason for party 4 u’s virality is that there is something about Charli’s and Gatby’s experiences that feel hauntingly like our own.

Perhaps you’ve posted an Instagram story with a specific person in mind; or perhaps you’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time carefully selecting a hyper-curated collection of pictures to go in a specific order on your Instagram post, then spent even more time choosing the perfect accompanying song and a caption that would make it seem like you didn’t spend any time on the post at all. Perhaps you’ve even gone through your Spotify playlists, or your Pinterest board, or your Letterboxd favourites, or your Instagram highlights, over and over again trying to imagine how someone else might perceive you.

The truth is, we spend an extraordinary amount of time deciding how we want to be seen. We curate our interests, our appearances, our belongings, our experiences, and sometimes even our personalities, constructing versions of ourselves that communicate precisely what we want others to believe about us. And while there is nothing particularly new about wanting to make a good impression, social media has given us unprecedented opportunities to do so.

This raises an interesting question: At what point did expressing ourselves become a performance of who we want other people to think we are, rather than who we actually are?

Watch Me Party On You

In 1959, sociologist Erving Goffman proposed that social interaction could be understood through the metaphor of theatrical performance. Much like actors on a stage, individuals manage their appearances, behaviours, and expressions to influence the impressions others form of them. 

This process, known as impression management, is not inherently dishonest. We naturally present different aspects of ourselves depending on our social environments; the version of ourselves we present to a professor may differ from the one we present to our closest friends, without either necessarily being inauthentic. Social media, however, introduces something interesting into the picture: the ability to carefully edit and preserve these performances.

Unlike face-to-face interactions, where impressions are often formed spontaneously, online self-presentation allows us to select photographs, rewrite captions, delete embarrassing posts, and construct an enduring digital representation of ourselves.

In relation to identity construction on social media, Pérez-Torres (2024) describes four themes, namely self-presentation, where adolescents attempt to manage how they portray themselves to others; social comparison, where adolescents compare themselves to others; role models, which are media figures whom adolescents look to to figure out how to act; and online audience, whom adolescents interact with online. The author goes on to describe social media as a context for identity development in which young people explore and present different aspects of themselves while receiving feedback from others. 

Our online identities, therefore, participate in shaping who we become. A single photograph can communicate that we’re cultured, desirable, well-read, mysterious, spontaneous, or effortlessly cool. In this way, our identities become something we can arrange and rearrange at will.

I Threw This Party Just For You

But who, exactly, are we arranging ourselves for?

Developmental psychologist David Elkind (1967) introduced the concept of the imaginary audience. Adolescents have a tendency to continuously perform for and react to an imagined audience, believing that other people are particularly attentive to their appearance and behaviour. Although this phenomenon predates social media, contemporary platforms provide an especially interesting environment in which to consider it.

We know, rationally, that most people scrolling through Instagram are probably not analysing the deeper implications of our music choices or the carefully selected photographs in our monthly photo dumps. And yet, we continue to construct our profiles as though someone is. Sometimes, that imagined observer is a romantic interest; sometimes it’s a former friend, an ex-partner, or a group of people whose approval we desperately want.

And sometimes, there isn’t even a specific person. Maybe we simply want to be perceived as someone worth knowing.

The imagined audience becomes particularly complicated online because our actual audience can contain people from entirely different parts of our lives. Researchers describe this phenomenon as context collapse, which is the convergence of audiences that would otherwise remain separate (Loh & Walsh, 2021).

Darr and Doss (2022), studying teenagers’ use of primary and secondary Instagram accounts, found that participants often viewed their main accounts as spaces for idealised self-presentation, while secondary accounts offered opportunities for expressions they considered more authentic. In other words, young people were not necessarily unaware that they were performing. They were actively negotiating when, where, and for whom different versions of themselves would appear.

Who Am I When the Party Is Over?

When there exists such a high level of self-curation, there is something deeper to be asked about the relationship between self-presentation and identity.

Self-concept clarity refers to how clearly and consistently we understand who we are based on our values, beliefs, relationships and goals (Schwartz et al., 2017). A systematic review found that authentic self-presentation on social media is associated with greater self-concept clarity, while social comparison is associated with greater identity exploration and identity distress (Avci et al., 2025). This, thus, strongly suggests that it deeply matters how we engage with the identities we construct online.

There is a meaningful difference between using social media to explore an existing interest and developing an interest primarily because of the identity it allows us to project. Of course, these experiences are not always easily distinguishable; we discover new music through other people, develop our tastes through cultural influences, and construct our identities partly through the communities to which we belong. But perhaps the more troubling possibility is that we can become increasingly attached to an image of ourselves that we have not actually had the opportunity to inhabit. We know what kind of person we want to look like before we know what kind of person we want to be.

And when our identities become organised around how others might perceive us, the distinction between self-expression and self-surveillance can become increasingly difficult to maintain.

What If Nobody Comes to the Party?

Which all brings us back to party 4 u.

What makes the song so devastating is not simply that the person Charli XCX wanted to see never arrived. It is that the entire celebration had been organised around their imagined presence, making it all for nought.

The party goes on. The music keeps playing. The decorations are expensive and beautiful. The people are there, dancing. But the one person whose attention would have made it all meaningful is absent.

Perhaps this is the danger of excessive self-curation. We can become so pre-occupied with constructing a life that will appear beautiful, interesting, or desirable to someone else, that we forget to consider whether we actually enjoy living it. We can dress for the person who might see us, listen to music for the person who might admire our taste, and document experiences for the people who might wish they had been there. 

But along the way, we sometimes forget that we were supposed to be having fun.

None of this means that we should stop caring how we’re perceived. Wanting to be admired, understood, and desired is profoundly human, and there is nothing wrong with treating personal style and self-presentation as creative endeavours. But there is a difference between expressing ourselves in the hope of being seen and constructing ourselves entirely around the possibility of being seen. 

So, maybe the question isn’t whether the party is beautiful enough, whether the DJ is putting out bangers, or whether we’re dancing in a way that someone else might find desirable. Maybe it’s whether we would still want to throw the party if we knew they weren’t coming.

And whether, even if nobody noticed, we would still want to dance.

References

Avci, H., Baams, L., & Kretschmer, T. (2025). A Systematic Review of Social Media Use and Adolescent Identity Development. Adolescent Research Review, 10, 219–236. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40894-024-00251-1 

Charli XCX. (2020). party 4 u [Song]. Atlantic Records UK.

Darr, C. R., & Doss, E. F. (2022). The Fake One is the Real One: Finstas, Authenticity, and Context Collapse in Teen Friend Groups. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 27(4), zmac009. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmac009

Elkind, D. (1967). Egocentrism in Adolescence. Child Development, 38(4), 1025. https://doi.org/10.2307/1127100 

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.

Loh, J. (M. I)., & Walsh, M. J. (2021). Social Media Context Collapse: The Consequential Differences Between Context Collusion Versus Context Collision. Social Media + Society, 7(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211041646

Pérez-Torres, V. (2024). Social media: a digital social mirror for identity development during adolescence. Current Psychology, 43, 22170–22180. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-05980-z 

Schwartz, S. J., Meca, A., & Petrova, M. (2017). Who am I and why does it matter? Linking personal identity and self-concept clarity. In J. Lodi-Smith & K. G. DeMarree (Eds.), Self-concept clarity (pp. 145–164). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71547-6_8