What does a home look like when you stop designing it to impress, and design it with no.1 in mind? At the centre of Rednote’s 2026 Annual Living Trends is that very question. The answer has been found in for-me-ism (适我主义), a term that’s generated over 6.26 million discussions and 2.04 billion views.
Alongside the report that surfaced the term, the platform released 100 Proposals for a ‘For-Me’ Home, distilling user behaviours into a clear direction: spaces built around the individual, not the ideal. It’s a notable shift in how people – or at least Rednote users – are designing the spaces they live in. Let’s unpack it.
For-me-ism is the end of the template home
For years, China’s home design discourse has been driven by aesthetics. Search terms like cream style or mid-century offered templates for what was considered a stylish home. Rednote’s data suggests that is no more.
‘Space is stepping back, and people are stepping forward,’ said the platform’s head of home content, Chuzhi. The shift is from copying visual styles to designing around personal routines, needs, and emotions.
Beneath that is a surge in X-for-me adaptations – child-friendly, pet-friendly, elderly-friendly, or simply lazy-friendly homes. Collectively, these search terms suggest users increasingly view the home as something that responds to the resident, rather than the other way round.
Going from optimisation to personalisation
At a functional level, this often begins with efficiency. Posts about de-houseworking are up 131% year-on-year, while searches for home flow have risen 75%. Users are redesigning layouts to reduce friction – no-bend bins, mess zones, and smoother movement paths.
There’s more… Searches for pet- and child-friendly homes have jumped 680% and 500%, while elderly-friendly living is up 149%. Homes are being adapted to multiple inhabitants – child-height design, pet access points, ageing-friendly retrofits – creating a more distributed version of comfort.
Rewriting what a home is for
The deeper shift is psychological. Searches for home as my energy field have surged 3,283%, alongside the rise of escape rooms and hobby-led spaces.
Users are building environments for emotional regulation as much as function. So-called pain rooms turn niche interests like anime or collectibles – into places to ease stress. In other words, the home becomes a cushion for mental wellbeing.
Home blogger @李小冷不冷, who has visited over 200 households, sums it up: ‘The biggest trend is that there is no trend.’ Beds move into living rooms. Kitchens disappear. Doors are removed. Coherence doesn’t take precedence over what the individual needs.
Writer and psychologist Zhang Chun links this to a broader social change. As living structures shift towards smaller households and urban systems ease survival pressures, individuals gain more room to prioritise themselves. The home becomes the clearest site for that autonomy.
For-me-ism: housing trend becoming lifestyle logic
For-me-ism goes beyond interiors into a wider behavioural shift. Travel, fashion, and hobbies are all being reoriented around personal preference rather than external standards. The rise of self-enrichment (精神丰容) captures this. Activities like bead art and crochet – both seeing sharp growth – offer controlled, high-feedback experiences that restore a sense of agency.
Rednote’s role is to surface and scale these behaviours. As Chuzhi notes, the test for a trend is simple: does it start from the individual? In that sense, for-me-ism is less a trend than a framework. It reflects a move away from standardised answers towards lives built on personal terms.
