Performative matcha drinkers are real. They’re just not who you think they are. You may be picturing a performative male reading a book, sipping matcha with wired earbuds in, but the real culprit is a lot harder to spot than people realize.
Now, I love matcha, and I always have. Does it taste earthy? Yes — and yet, I love the taste, which is why I feel comfortable saying this: most people don’t actually like matcha. What they do like are sugary drinks. I also love a fun, tasty drink (who doesn’t?), but there’s no need to turn everything into matcha. Strawberry banana cloud cream matcha? Teddy Graham brown sugar cinnamon matcha? At that point, you’re just drinking flavored green milk. It’s as though people feel the need to trick themselves into liking matcha.
I’m not saying you can’t sweeten your drinks — I’ll order an iced vanilla matcha without hesitation. But there’s a point where it stops enhancing the flavor and starts replacing it entirely. Time and time again, cafes and TikTok push overly-flavored matchas that mask the drink’s original flavor entirely. The most disappointing part is when I order a fun, creative matcha, expecting something subtle yet flavorful, and am instead bombarded with straight sugar milk. This has occurred too many times for me to hold my peace.
If you feel the need to put that much flavoring into your matcha, you do not actually like the taste. And that’s okay — no one is forcing you to like it. But that’s the point: people feel like they have to. I’ve even seen people on TikTok actively trying to convince themselves to like matcha. It’s as though it becomes less about enjoying the drink and more about becoming the type of person who drinks it. Is it really about the drink, or is it just about the aesthetic?
And I don’t mean for this to sound pretentious. I’m just calling out the desire people have to “fit in” by convincing themselves they like something trendy when, in reality, that may not be the case. At a certain point, the matcha itself disappears. And that’s what this is really about. This performative behavior reflects something bigger: the tendency to convince ourselves we like things just because they’re trendy, because they symbolize a certain identity and because they help us fit in.
It’s also interesting to note how quickly this shift has happened. Matcha wasn’t always this dessert-like drink, but was rather traditionally appreciated for its distinct, earthy flavor and its cultural Japanese significance. As it’s become more popular, it has gradually drifted away from its unique cultural value and taste. The more mainstream it has gotten, the more it’s been altered to appeal to a wider audience, and we can see the qualities that once made it unique being stripped away. In the process, something that once carried cultural meaning is becoming reduced to another aesthetic “trend.”
This popularization and emphasis on aesthetic value extends beyond matcha to other coffee culture and wellness trends (i.e., Hailey Bieber ate sushi with a face mask, so I ate sushi with a face mask). At a certain point, it’s no longer about what we actually enjoy, but about who we want to appear to be. This raises a larger question of whether our preferences are truly our own, or if they’re being shaped, possibly subtly, by what we see and consume online. Ultimately, this behavior reflects how social media and trends often shape what we center our behavior and identities around, highlighting the larger societal pressures at play when it comes to choosing what to like.
