TikTok’s narration trend is making boring look brilliant

She stared blankly into the distance. The laundry had been sitting in the machine for three days. The fridge contained exactly one sad tomato and a bottle of expired milk. ‘She called it dinner.’

Welcome to the narrator voice-over trend, where nothing is happening, but everything feels like a plot.

What began as a quiet corner of the internet has now exploded across TikTok and Instagram: people narrating their lives in a deliberately dry, emotionally detached or dramatically whimsical tone, as if their to-do lists are part of some art-house movie. Think Wes Anderson-style pastels, symmetrical camera angles and scripts that turn breakfast into a plot twist. It’s not just content. It’s a curation of chaos. You’re not just cleaning your room. You’re a woman on the brink of a mild breakdown, bravely removing five emotional support coffee cups from her desk while whispering, ‘It had to come to this.’

But beneath the aesthetic is something far more relatable. There’s comfort in treating your own life like fiction. It creates distance. Because it’s therapeutic.

Turning your existential spiral into a mini-movie makes it feel…productive? Even kind of glamorous? You’re not failing — you’re just in Act II, where everything is supposed to fall apart a little. The absurdity becomes poetic. The mess becomes a mood. Of course, everyone’s got their own flavour.

There’s the Wes Anderson crew — pastels, precision and people making coffee like it’s religious ritual. Then there’s the true crime parody types: ‘She opened WhatsApp. ‘What she saw next..ruined her week.’. And let’s not forget the nature doc-style narrators calmly observing themselves in the wild: ‘Here, we see the 27-year-old attempting to respond to emails. She is, once again, failing.’ 

The trend works because it lets people reframe stress as storytelling. It’s not just ‘I spent two hours scrolling Instagram instead of working.’ It’s ‘He was supposed to reply to emails. But instead, he watched five videos about ducks wearing shoes.’

It’s all part coping mechanism, part performance art. Narrating your life gives you control in a world where nothing else really make sense — especially not your screen time report. And let’s be real, if your life’s going to be a mess, it might as well be aesthetically documented.

 So go ahead. Film yourself making toast like it’s a scene from Little Women. Narrate your commute like you’re being hunted by the FBI. Add a little British accent. Add drama. Because if we can’t fix our lives…we might as well romanticise the disaster.