Article
Sunday State of Mind
photo from the @sunday.scaries Instagram
For a certain set of people, it’s become a Friday ritual – open Instagram, scroll until the familiar font appears issuing a directive so inviting, it might as well be gospel:
*slams laptop shut til Monday*
It’s one of the pillars of Sunday Scaries (@sunday.scaries), a social media account that puts words to the minor anxieties of modern life and, through original photography, as well as snapshots shared by zeitgeisty celebrities, suggests seductive ways to assuage them. Could a roaring fire and a “heavy pour of red wine” cure your existential ennui? (Seems worth a try.) How do you “Sunday” – like Martha Stewart in sweats, watering her garden, or Rihanna in bed, eating caviar by the spoon? (Or are you more of a Kyle MacLachlan, screaming into the void?) In an ideal world, what would you do after slamming shut that laptop? Might it involve an Aperol Spritz, a swimming pool, some nuts and olives – perhaps all of the above?
“I want everything I post to feel relatable in some way, even tangentially,” says Will deFries, the creator of Sunday Scaries. “I try to harness the mood of that time of the week, month or year. How are you feeling going into a long weekend? How about a Monday?”
Founded in 2014, Sunday Scaries started as a web- site where Will, then working for a lifestyle boutique in his hometown of Harbor Springs, Michigan, wrote about quotidian concerns – the malaise brought on by a Sunday morning hangover, how to get out of a dinner that you don’t really want to attend. “You hear the word ‘anxiety’ so much,” Will says, “but people don’t really like talking about their own anxieties publicly. Being able to say ‘scaries’ or ‘Sunday scaries’ makes it more approachable. It’s more innocent. It doesn’t evoke as much dread. There are so many things that can give people scaries – something stupid they did over the weekend, something they’re not looking forward to in the week ahead.”
The website gave rise to a podcast; in 2019, Will quit his job to focus on Sunday Scaries full time. In 2020, the Instagram account took off, “mid-pandemic, when every day felt like a Sunday,” Will says. Sponsors like Kiehl’s and Netflix took note, partnering with Sunday Scaries ahead of
various launches. The account, which now has more than 800,000 followers, toggles between embracing excess – a photo of six espresso martinis, held aloft, mid-cheers – and acknowledging its effects – a video of a placid Lake Como overlaid with “slow down.” How does Will figure out what tone to strike, and when?
“I try to maintain a mix that is, above all, approachable,” he says. “The prepackaged, perfect life that we used to see a lot on Instagram – no one wants that any- more. Being a little cheeky is more palatable than being prescriptive, understanding that even if we’re doing a wellness ritual,” say, a face mask, a frequent Sunday Scaries motif, “it’s because there’s part of our life that might be a mess, that we’re not vying for perfection.”
That said, visually, certain scenes appeal more than others.
“If you think about a Sunday after you’ve had one too many glasses of wine, you don’t want to picture yourself lying next to your cluttered coffee table and a bottle of Gatorade,” Will says. “You want to picture yourself lying on a freshly mowed croquet court in the sun. It’s aspirational.”
To amp up the aesthetics of the original photography featured on Sunday Scaries, Will travels to scenic destinations – including Blackberry Mountain and Blackberry Farm – and, lately, has been shooting with a Nikon camera from the 1990s.
“Film feeds into the appetite for nostalgia that a lot of us have lately,” he says.
Sunday Scaries also culls from the hopeful optimism of ’90s cultural touchstones, like Friends, Sex and the City and You’ve Got Mail. Will knows that he’s an unlikely vessel. How often are people surprised to find out that the person behind Sunday Scaries is, as he tells it, “a 37-year-old with a scraggly beard?” “All the time,” he says. “I try not to be offended. I understand where they’re coming from. I don’t think there are a lot of guys that want to watch a rom-com on a Sunday afternoon.”
In a scenario befitting a Nora Ephron movie, he met his wife, Sally, through Sunday Scaries. “I did a kind of joke post about seeking a girlfriend, and I thought her responses were funny,” he says. He ended up moving to Austin, Texas, to be with her; they’re now married with two children. “She’s my female muse, when it comes to content,” Will says. “We see things in a similar way.” (He notes that now that they’re parents, their Sunday mornings involve a lot more cluttered coffee tables than freshly mowed croquet courts.)
That thread of togetherness, of seeing yourself in another, runs through Sunday Scaries. Be it Monday or Friday, a photo of an unmade bed or a crystalline goblet of wine, there’s a spirit of, “we’re all in this together” – the ups, the downs and everything in between.
“Ultimately, many of us have anxiety because we feel alone,” says Will. “If we’re all scared together, we’re less scared collectively. You want to know that you’re not alone in your anxieties, and that there’s always something to look forward to.” Cheers to that.