Many years ago, my wife bought a rather sleek pair of Italian sunglasses (with only a little encouragement from me). But when she first saw them, a close acquaintance remarked, “Those are a hard person’s sunglasses!” A throwaway comment – perhaps – from someone close enough not to cause offence – but I remember it as an example of rather stark social discrimination.

All dark glasses inhibit eye contact – thus compromising a fundamental part of human interaction; I suppose this is why they supposedly make the wearer look cool (for which read distant). But why some sunglasses might be deemed to be more extreme than others, is intriguing – a matter of fine, perhaps-unconscious differentiation (maybe it’s down to how dark they are?). Behind it lie all sorts of assumptions about a relationship between an inert item and the decision of an individual person to own and wear it – and it is this that has given me lasting curiosity about such issues.

It is not clear, for a start, whether the critique was aimed at the glasses or the wearer. The implications are quite different, since one is an evaluation of an inert item, while the other is a potentially hurtful personal criticism. Probably, it is the interplay between the two that is most meaningful – and the hardest to unpick.

The opportunity did not arise to enquire what supposedly made those glasses ‘hard’, what ‘not hard’ ones might look like – nor what new feelings had been provoked about their owner. As our friend knew, my wife is not remotely a ‘hard’ person, so perhaps it was the perceived incongruity that was her point. In fact, the glasses had been chosen simply because their owner liked them, and felt they suited her face particularly well – though it would be disingenuous notto wonder what unconscious awareness also went into that thinking. Were the effect of what we wear unimportant, no one would ever bother to differentiate: like it or not, sunglasses have become more than just a practical means of shading one’s eyes.

Trying to understand what drives our own tastes can be difficult enough, but it’s even more so with others, whose real motives we can often only guess at. To what extent may even our own aesthetic be influenced by its likely impact on others? How much more so with others? Which is more important – our own preference or the desired reaction? Can we even separate them? How much disapproval are we prepared to tolerate for the sake of personal expression? How much deception for the sake of approval? This little incident neatly brings us back to the confusion that repeatedly arises between social and aesthetic ‘language’, and its significance for both personal relations and one’s freedom innocently to do as one chooses.

The exchange of social messages is a hard-wired human behaviour, which human ingenuity has extended into a vast array of new fields. Even by default, everything we do is laden with social meaning – a projection of how we see ourselves, but also in some eyes, of our social and economic status. The variety and sophistication of our means of expression now far outstrip our sensory abilities to differentiate with confidence. (Those sunglasses were produced by Laura Biagiotti, whose founder was a progressive Italian businesswoman – but I doubt they were widely seen as a feminist political statement….)

Thus, misunderstandings arise all the time and there is little we can do about them, for the reading of our own signals is barely in our own hands. It is exceptionally difficult to know how others really perceive us; the only clue we have lies in their outward reactions, which themselves may or may not be sincere. Those reactions are interpreted in a context supplied by the recipient and if that is faulty, the message taken may be quite different from any intended. Appearances can be deceptive – and it is worth remembering that people may under-play as well as the converse… Yet if we attempt conscious control, we can end up imposing a straitjacket on our own choices simply from fear of giving offence or being misunderstood.

Underpinning this may lie a question of trust. Behind the sunglasses comment was perhaps the belief that stylistic naivety is a virtue, and those who do make conscious choices must therefore be revealing something undesirable. For sure, people who knowingly control their outward messages are perhaps more capable of cynical deception than those with less self-awareness, though it does not mean this is always the case. There are sound instinctual reasons to consider this – though it may also be a function of prevailing social norms: those suspicions are not necessarily well-founded, and the errors and suspicions are not necessarily the same everywhere.

In reality, the message might simply be, “I like this”.

It is profoundly difficult to achieve objectivity about the sensory experiences that influence taste, even though we often experience them as a seemingly absolute phenomenon. I suspect it lies in the way which certain things tickle the senses more vigorously than others, which can have a striking effect on the receptive observer. This may be why certain sounds, sights, smells, tastes and feelings elicit stronger reactions than others; things which somehow ‘speak’ to the recipient, and which people often consciously seek out. One’s appreciation may become more refined over time, but the sensations themselves tend to be fairly consistent between individuals. But importantly, receptivity (whether innate or learned) may differ between people.

An aesthete might be defined as someone who deliberately seeks and learns a refined appreciation of such experiences. The rewards are fundamentally internal (which is why people struggle to express them in words) – but it still inescapably involves differentiating between superior and inferior experiences. Over time, discernment can be learned and refined, and perhaps becomes increasingly important for influencing personal decisions.

A status-seeker might be defined as someone who believes they can boost their social standing by the possession and display of rare, valuable and (sometimes) beautiful things. This too implies differentiation – but also an attitude of superiority towards those who do not have them: that is the whole point. It is competitive in a way connoisseurship is mostly not. Often it conflates quality and quantity and places more emphasis on displays of ownership than quiet appreciation. It is perhaps more prone to poor judgement, since its preoccupation is status and external approval, rather than beauty – and there are many overblown, even grotesque, things that in some eyes, at some times, confer status.

But since beauty often also commands a high price, it is at this point that we enter the minefield where social statement and aesthetic merit overlap.

We are so used to associating sumptuousness and ‘luxury’ with high social standing that it can be very difficult to separate the two in our minds – not that certain aesthetic movements, notably modernism, have not tried to point out that beauty can be found in all sorts of simple and non-exclusive things too.

This tendency may be modified by societal contexts. In strongly hierarchical societies, status-seeking is probably more prevalent than in more egalitarian ones. Consequently, one’s acts may well be judged more for their social implications than their aesthetic. Everyday signs of this abound: “That’s posh” is rather different from “That’s beautiful”.

Due to its competitiveness, social differentiation is also likely to be more polarised. It seeks external validation, whereas truly aesthetic judgements are inherently a graded, individual matter, and therefore harder to dismiss. Experience suggests that in Britain, conversation (and hence attention) habitually revolves around social interpretation rather than expressions of individual taste. It is not necessarily the same everywhere.

Savoir-Vivre is not a particularly status-laden term in France. It can apply to doing even simple things with personal style, grace and skill. La Dolce Vita and La bella figura are similar in Italy. It is striking that we do not really have equivalent terms in English – and what’s more, we tend either to lampoon or envy those who manage to embody them.

In France, chic is an aesthetic – but the British have misappropriated the word to make a social statement. Yet none of those phrases is about having: they are about doing or knowing. Quality of life is not something you buy – it is something you create.

Habitual British life is not so much about artfulness as positioning, status and ambition – and where not that, a dull, indifferent uniformity prevails, that refuses to do more than shrug at anything. There are many, many people whose tastes and habits, judging from their behaviour, are indistinguishable. I fail to believe this is because they really are clones – so what is going on?

Accusations of getting “above oneself” can occur anywhere in society where people are thought to be sticking their heads above the parapet, for snobbery is not by any means the preserve of the especially privileged. For the majority who do not want this, ‘taste’ therefore means belonging to a homogenous mainstream whose only real social reference is not to be a snob. Anyone who acts differently risks certain conclusions being drawn…

Another give-away is transience. Societies that are driven by social advancement need fashions to move quickly, since being ahead of the curve is a powerful differentiator: exclusivity depends on keeping the masses at bay, and one way of doing this is through rapid change so that others have no time, money nor inside knowledge to keep up. Fashion drives conspicuous consumption: those who wish to send the ‘right’ social messages may be more prone to rapid shifts in their (current) tastes as they repeatedly gravitate to whatever is on trend.  In reality, it is mostly all just more of the same: robotic consumption with eyes, ears and other senses firmly closed; only social antennae awake. Things that move this quickly never have a chance to register or bond deeply with their owners. Those who are motivated more by personal style may stick to what they like, whether it is currently fashionable or not. Fashions change; styles do not. In Britain, the ephemeral eddies of fashion dominate the social uniform of those who strive to exhibit their ‘class’ – except amongst the elite, who retain an unchanging style all of their own…

The problem is that aesthetes and social signallers often appear to appreciate the same things, albeit for very different reasons. In an opera-house audience, how many people are present because they genuinely love the music, and how many because the moment’s social kudos demands it? Does that piece of art on the wall reflect a deep sensitivity, or an investment opportunity to impress? If you ask someone whether they like Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony and they reply, “Which conductor?” are they being pretentious or knowledgeable? Superficially, it can be impossible to tell – but I suspect that those who are concerned with status simply don’t experience the joy of genuine appreciation.

The problem awakens when these groups encounter each other: the majority will form views on minorities, be they (supposedly) superior or inferior – and minorities may have reciprocal views about the ignorance, banality or superficiality of the mainstream majority. Judgements and criticism may be inferred even when none is intended – usually based on perceived arrogance, condescension, or elitism (though sometimes also coarseness). There is a risk that people may choose to self-exclude from things they would otherwise appreciate, rather than attract adverse comment or challenge their wider self-image or tribal allegiance.

Groupthink can balkanise attitudes and behaviours – and this can certainly curtail individual liberty, particularly for those who step outside prevailing norms for even the most innocent of reasons. Elites tend to define and possess the means to exclude those they wish, but self-exclusion by others – inverted snobbery – only makes the job easier. Status-seeking makes it worse because it hands one’s personal validation over to others. Much better just to define, and stick to, one’s own terms.

Behind the outward disapprobation, I suspect often lies a sense of personal insecurity, or else a sneaking respect for those whose independence of mind allows them to escape or ignore such pitfalls. True appreciation is the innocent celebration of our good fortune, not sulking about what we don’t have. The error is to believe that such people are somehow super-human, rather than simply ordinary individuals who have made the effort to learn, to know and think for themselves – and in the process perhaps become rather less ordinary.

The first of several pieces on personal expression, social pressure and a search for quality.

“You two look smart. Big occasion?”

“We’re just going for the newspaper”, we replied.

The reaction was uncertain – but as a compliment seemed to have been paid, it would have been churlish to be churlish. Yet expectations of normal behaviour had clearly been transgressed…

There is, they say, no accounting for taste. But that’s not true: if anything, there is too much accounting for taste. Trying to figure out what makes people tick is perhaps too complex to fathom – in particular, the dynamic between a simple visible expression of personal preference and the reaction that others have to it. Individual these situations may be, but they bear on us all, affecting what we choose to do – and what wider society will accept our doing.

The passeggiata only works because of the collective will. One person putting on their glad-rags and going for a walk alone of an evening just doesn’t work in the same way. We know, we’ve tried. No one actively prevents us, but the critical mass just isn’t there when everyone else is indoors, glued to the Box. Without them, our passeggiata cannot exist. It is not only individual decisions but also collective ones that determine (even by default) what matters and what does not, what can or cannot happen, even what an individual can easily do. Some things somehow become considered normal, others oddly deviant.

While this might seem trivial, behind it is a complex dynamic around the values and attitudes that shape society, and the serious matter of the ability of individuals and groups within it genuinely to live as they choose. Choices are often straightforward for the mainstream – but for those who step outside it, headway can be difficult enough without the indifference, let alone condemnation, of the majority to make it worse.

There may be more at stake than meets the eye: not all situations are equally benign for the human condition, and societies that find a good balance between belonging and individual free expression are perhaps healthier and happier than more conformist or repressive ones. Key to it is the social interaction that all humans engage in constantly – and the effects that this has on their behaviours. The Passeggiata Paradox, then, is simply my shorthand for the possibly beneficial things that never come to pass, even for those who actively want them, simply because of mass ignorance or indifference. What are we missing, because of it?

In the days when recorded-music shops were more of a thing than they are now, the same issue could be seen at work in the shelf-space given to different types of music. Most was given over to the many sub-divisions of commercial ‘popular’ entertainment-noise that may or may not have musical merit as opposed to being a vicarious route to Celebrity. Other types of music: classical, jazz, folk, early music and so on, were usually relegated to the further reaches with a just a few bays between them, despite the fact that each is probably just as capable of filling an entire shop. (R.I.P. Coda Music, Edinburgh). Thus, one thing became the self-perpetuating ‘norm’ at the expense of (at least) equally deserving others: the interests of one group: “the majority”(?) unwittingly given almost total precedence over others.

The reason for such inequality is a collusion between the herd instinct that assumes that most people would rather seek safety in the crowd than do anything much actively to assert their individuality, and the unregulated commercial interests whom it suits to encourage it to be so. Tribalism is hard-wired into our species; I suppose it saves an amount of thought – and making social errors. Of course, business is entirely happy with this, since it is more profitable to shift large quantities of homogenised lowest-common-denominator to an undemanding mass-market, than to respond to a diverse range of individual preferences. Done skilfully, you can even persuade them that they are still making individual distinctions…

On the rare occasion that the mainstream’s attention is drawn to something more specialist, it will normally be commercialised to make it more “accessible” (read marketable and mass-producible) – thereby losing many of whatever distinctive qualities it had in the first place. Step up, amongst others, almost every themed chain restaurant or cafe in the country… What you get in such places is rarely more than a pastiche.

The habitual solution for those who cannot accept this, has been to resort to specialist providers. But these are often of limited viability (especially when ‘helped’ out of business by the aggressive tactics of the big boys) and frequently beyond the geographical reach of many. The internet may be the saviour of many such minority concerns.

More concerning is the ghettoisation of niche groups that brings the risk of misunderstanding and conflict, and certainly diminishes the scope for crossover and mutual discovery. There are many examples of minorities for whom the consequences have been much more serious than over their choice of music.

One can argue that the freedom with which I supposedly make my choices is precisely the same that others have, to make different ones – but this ignores the fact that one person’s freedom can easily trump another’s.  It is also at odds with my persistent doubts that many personal choices are really anything of the sort. How else can one explain the dominance, in a nation of millions of individual sentient minds, of the overwhelming homogeneity of mainstream taste? Conversation has yet to convince me that many people bring much real thought or conviction to these things and more often just take the line of least resistance, conveniently provided by ‘convention’ – and the mass-market retailers. It might not matter if it did less harm to the interests of the few who think harder…

From our early years we learn that people’s actions have social meaning. It is a fundamental of human psychology to signal and infer identity. Today, this is complex: what and where people eat or purchase, how they dress, what they read and listen to, where they travel, how they furnish their homes, with whom they associate, whom they marry, where they holiday, and pretty much all stops between: everything can be seen as a form of social statement. We can’t avoid it since the message is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, not the sender. Despite (or more likely because of) that, remaining in the herd and playing-safe is a strong driver of behaviour.

This is the logic behind chain retailing: that which is numerically dominant thrives and that which is not, withers. It is the law of the market society – but hardly a recipe for diversity. It doesn’t matter whether what is popular has any inherent merit: majority buy-in is all that counts. But there is a weakness: this can be manipulated. Fashions and trends are rarely really determined as much by popular demand as it seems, but by what suppliers decide they are going to provide. We can’t easily choose what is not available.

Herd behaviour can become a form of oppression of those who have different ideas: either you conform, or your “unviable” needs go unmet. The numbers game is intimidating, and it takes a determined individual to swim for long against a strong social or economic current. It is not helped by the fact that despite their numerical advantage, herds often do not tolerate deviants, being more inclined to drive them out; it is no coincidence that victims of bullying are often those perceived as being “different”. It is true that some people choose to be different precisely to send a certain message – and they may thrive on the adverse reactions they get. But there are others who neither want this, nor indeed the only alternative of going it alone. They simply need a different herd from the only one on offer.

Awareness of “inclusiveness” has grown in recent times – but this is curious and perhaps self-defeating. True inclusiveness is not a matter of low-level homogenisation, but tolerance, pluralism and perhaps cross-fertilisation. Yet society in effect chooses which minorities it will ‘include’ and which it will ignore – which is not inclusiveness at all. Yet there is a contradiction here too: such pluralism might also seem precisely the opposite of the kind of cultural cohesion required to make the passeggiata and other collective experiences work. How to reconcile these opposing forces?

My experience suggests that more egalitarian societies, or those lacking a history of rigid hierarchy, are less socially competitive, and therefore less troubled by those who step outside their norms – or by status-signalling more generally. Or perhaps it is just that their norms are more loosely defined so that people have less need to step outside them in the first place. Some limits to individual freedom are always necessary to avoid breaching the boundaries of legality – but some societies self-impose constraints of social convention or commercial pressure which are much narrower than that.

Despite its self-delusion, Britain is still strongly socially stratified. One cannot grow up here without absorbing an awareness that judgements may be inferred about one’s standing – and worse still, aspirations – from almost everything one does. Wearing a certain tie – or a school uniform – is often a badge of social differentiation rather than anything of much beauty. In Britain, going the opera is likely seen as a social statement whereas in Italy it is more likely to be accepted as a musical choice that cuts across social groups. The minor misunderstanding at the start of this piece derived from an assumption that we were making a deliberate social statement rather than reflecting an innocent personal preference; it was not the first time.

Personal choices and social ambitions are indeed easily confused, as their means of expression can appear identical – but the motives are very different: one seeks intrinsic pleasure, the other extrinsic advantage. Yet it can be extremely difficult to distinguish them, especially when one has been raised in a society that routinely does the opposite.

In this way, we arrive at a situation where it becomes intimidating for individuals to express their real preferences for fear of disapproval or misunderstanding; all the more so when judgements are attached not just to one’s personal choices, but implicitly even to one’s worth as a human being. This may sound extreme, but it is not such a great step in a society where some people are still implicitly considered inherently socially superior to others.

I do not have an insider’s view of the passeggiata: I have only ever participated as a visitor. But as far as I can see, it is not the social straitjacket that it might appear. There is little compulsion to take part. But what it does do is present an opportunity for people to see and be seen if they so wish. Their motives for doing so may be complex but are not, I suspect, primarily avaricious. For a start it takes place in a society where creative, aesthetic self-expression is given greater approval than in Britain; where it may be possible to appreciate (or disapprove of) behaviours and choices without attaching the heavy social condemnation as well. I have noticed the diversity that results – for within that social framework exists the possibility for wide individual interpretation. Sometimes things that appear to constrain freedom have the opposite effect – and vice versa.

The trade-off between the individual and the collective is not the same everywhere; there is no single “right” answer, even though some solutions may be more benign than others. Neither, despite its conservatism, is the UK uniquely cursed: for example, the beacon of social liberalism that is Denmark has also been criticised as a subtly conformist form of hell – and the anarchy of the free-for-all has clear downsides too… Perhaps conservative cultures are more likely to pass social judgements than others, but even in Italy, for all the strong currents of individual flamboyance, there co-exists a distinct thread of social conservatism.

Norms change over time: when everyone else is wearing jeans and hoodies, it is the necktie-wearer who is the rebel.  The best trade-off is perhaps where people freely make their own choices, but still choose to participate because they do not feel unduly constrained by doing so. Only when people can participate reasonably on their own terms will they do so willingly and unselfconsciously. The key to this is tolerance and understanding from everyone else.

The problem for the British (and nations like them) is that they do not recognise their own conformism: it is hidden by the fact that so few step outside it.  When it does happen, it is often in violent or destructive ways that seem the only way to make it register: the conformity of rebellion by getting wrecked every Friday night – which is not rebellion at all…

It is reinforced by those commercial interests: it is easier to appeal to people’s groupthink and snobbery than their individuality. Products are advertised on their supposed exclusivity or sophistication rather than their intrinsic appeal. Even when that depends on an inverted form of snobbery, the mechanism is the same. And life-events such as weddings are widely planned primarily for their social impact, sometimes at the cost of aesthetic crassness. And of course, it is precisely in such circumstances that the two are most hopelessly confused, for a wedding remains perhaps the worst place to make a social faux pas.

The dominance of mainstream culture makes it harder for those who operate by different criteria to live and act the way they choose, without fear of misunderstanding, or worse. It reaches its censorious head when attitudes balkanise into prejudice and hostility.

But we should perhaps remember that all people have their foibles, and therefore it is perhaps unwise not to accommodate minorities: at some point, we may find that the minority is not others: it is Us.

I guess it’s my professional background that is to blame – you can’t really function as a teacher without thinking of the issue of ‘life chances’. When you do a job that largely lacks a clear relationship between inputs and outputs, it is necessary to understand one’s purpose in the longer term. But I’m far from certain that the notion enjoys wide currency amongst those about whom teachers spend so much time thinking. I wonder how many people would consider themselves to be living a life which is mostly of their own determining.

I have recently been trying to help a long-standing friend deal with mental health difficulties, who seems to have had just such a problem. Having “been there” myself, I feel that only those who have been, can really understand it. But it doesn’t make being helpful much easier; the essence of such difficulties is that they distort one’s perception of everything else. Unlike, say, a stomach-ache, where at least one can identify the source of the distress, mental pain projects itself onto everything else, and conceals its true self behind that. It is like wearing a pair of grey glasses: they make the whole world look grey – but it is all too easy to forget that the problem lies with the glasses, not the rest of the world. Hence part of the problem with mental health can be identifying its true source – which may not lie where you think it does. And in turn, this can make it all the more difficult to identify what needs to be done: the temptation is to aim at the smoke rather than the flame…

Such difficulties may be a mixture of inheritance and background. There may not be much we can do about the former – but I suspect that we do nowhere near enough about the latter. As with physical health, we need to set up good habits early in life. But for all the talk about mental health, I wonder how much is being done to make that possible. Prime amongst these should come encouraging people to understand that they can act positively to develop their own selves, where they can cultivate all aspects of their personal identity and needs.

The neglect starts young: many young people are supervised by ‘helicopter’ adults for every moment of their waking lives. My friend seems to have had an early experience of this: she attended a minor public school which, by virtue of its boarders, operated a seven-day week, and made almost as many demands on the day-pupils (of which she was one) as those who lived ‘in’. From an early age, her life was dominated by the externally imposed demands of not only academic work, but sporting and musical life. Combined with high parental expectations, this perhaps leaves little opportunity for young people just to be alone with their thoughts, to learn to understand themselves, and to explore their own tastes and priorities. I suspect that the relief from the treadmill that many say they experienced during lockdown tells an important story here.

My friend was successful, eventually gaining an Oxford degree, and entering a demanding profession in which she has worked ever since. Even from a distance, I could see that her work dominated her life (not that mine as a teacher did not try to, as well…). She admits that her work came to be her main, even only, source of personal validation. In my case, I refused point-blank to let that be the case. There is just too much living to be done to allow that – and I never did see the point of living to work. After all, our masters, who urge us to do so often do not practise what they preach…

The problem with living to work is that those “life chances” become externally-defined – the meeting of targets, the acquisition of wealth and status, the progression of one’s career – or at very least, the pinning of one’s self-esteem solely on the competence with which one does one’s job. As with schooling, the modern workplace leaves precious little time for people to create their own meaning of Self.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter too much, if one is content to live one’s life on others’ terms. Be they inherited from one’s family, or the work-ethic inherited from one’s schooling or workplace, if you narrow your horizons and close off your curiosity, it may provide an adequate if pedestrian life, so long as you Play The Game.

But sometimes, The Game plays you. In both my friend’s case and my own, we found ourselves in workplaces whose toxic culture knew no limits, that ate people whole, chewed them up and if they resisted, spat the remains back out again. The stress of this experience is enough to endanger anyone’s mental health – and that, in both of our cases, it did.

The day when one can no longer do one’s job, a huge hole opens up in life; not only the loss of direction or a defined “role”, but also a large amount of time that needs to be filled. Particularly if one is struggling mentally, this can be difficult; as some found during lockdown, it is frightening how willingly the underoccupied mind fills that void with all sorts of terrors.

This is where the lack of prior thinking can be problematic. If you have become a live-to-work type, you risk having invested so much in that aspect of life that you neglected the rest of it. Who and what are you – really – when you are not at work? When work fills the day (and the mind) you can avoid this question for years, but when work stops, it can be hard to ignore.

My friend thinks that it began early in her life; even during school holidays, the conditioning made her struggle to cope with the absence of ready-made, work-orientated routine. Even her musical and other activities assumed the status of quasi-work – a mad rush to fulfil a large number of commitments that she had felt she had to accept. Listening to her some years ago, even non-work had started to sound like an extension of her job.

Perhaps many people live their entire lives like this: on autopilot. Filling their lives with busy-ness to avoid ever having to address the existential questions about their own meaning. Leisure sounds good, but in reality, can be a problem, unless you take active charge of what you do with it. I suspect that the British psyche adds problems: it is all too easy in this country to conflate positive living with social climbing or the precious pampering of the celebs. Outwith a certain privileged and self-obsessed minority, it is just not done to be too upbeat about how one lives. As a nation, we seem obsessed with the perceived grandeur of superior lives, and yet we often take little care with our own.

But I think there is a difference between self-indulgence and simply making an active decision to try to live well. It can equally be argued that to neglect active thinking about our lives is to waste the most precious asset that we have: life itself. Somewhere in there lies the contradictory legacy of a guilty, Puritan past in which pleasure was a sin… I suspect it lies in neither the entitlement of privilege nor the mindlessness of the herds that many seek to lose themselves in even when not at work; both are the antithesis of the balanced, authentic individual.

We cannot avoid having to dress, to eat, needing homes, interacting with our fellows, even consuming at some level. So we might as well do them well, gratefully, carefully and with enjoyment (however we define it). The mindful pleasure of doing something well generally far exceeds the saved hassle from not bothering. The problem is that this requires more effort than many seem either prepared to make, or to have time and energy left for. Somewhere, this appreciation needs an awokennness to the physical sensations of the world, which again exhaustion or distraction – or that protestant denial – so easily blunts in us.

My go-to psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi concluded that the principal source of human fulfilment is the self-challenge that leads to increasing competence and complexity of being. This is why it is worth taking almost any aspect of life beyond the basic. The problem in Britain is that the connoisseurs or cognoscenti who do so are regarded with inverted snobbery, rather than respected for their insight. True, affectation can reinforce a certain impression, but once again we confuse genuine expertise with social display. Yet such insight is open to anyone who makes the effort.

There are, of course, plenty of individuals who do take mindful care of their lives – but I suspect they are still vastly outnumbered by those who don’t. What is more, neglect seems to have become the definition of normality. The overwhelming message is “convenience” – for which read “anything that requires only the minimum of thought or effort”. Don’t try hard. (But let’s not forget that real sprezzatura requires effort….)

I feel thankful now that over the years I found I had to reject this thinking. It meant heading into fields that were, in terms of my upbringing, quite unfamiliar territory; drawing lines around my working life and sometimes stepping outside the norms of my peers. It is undeniable that this set up conflicts that eventually gave me problems. But I remain adamant that a balanced and thoughtfully fulfilled life is both a reasonable aspiration, and in fact makes for a more contented and productive working life as well. In the longer term, it served me well when my own working life collapsed and threatened to take my sanity and sense of self with it.

I pointed this out to my suffering friend; sadly, I got the impression that she rejects it as a kind of vanity – a form of fake “lifestyle” whose purpose is social display or furtherment.

I see it as a matter of authenticity. However, it is true that the similar calculations are done by some simply to impress and can indeed be inauthentic. They may superficially appear the same, but I think there are two differences. One is in the mind: a simple matter of personal honesty about one’s motives, whether other people understand or not. The second is consistency; a sure sign of inauthenticity is tastes that change with the winds of social status and fashion. They are likely to be characterised by superficiality, whereas true passions are ones that encourage you to delve deeper, to find greater complexity and discernment. Passing fads never achieve that.

An excellent example of this is male dress, from which this blog takes its title. There is a world of difference between a man who genuinely appreciates a fine, timeless aesthetic no matter what his means, and those who seemingly do the same things, but just to exhibit their wealth and status. The same can be said for food, travel, homes and almost any aspect of what for some is “lifestyle” but for others, just Life.

I consider myself lucky that I had somehow figured a lot of this out by the time my own zero-hour arrived. It didn’t protect me entirely from the demands of over-work; my professional life (and mental health) came crashing down about five years ago as a result of overwhelming workplace stress. But through all the difficulties that followed, I am certain that all the other elements of the life I have built were my safety net: the things that remained constant even as other things lurched all over the place. They anchored my sense of who and what I am and have continued to do so as I recovered. What’s more, my appetite for that life filled the hours that suddenly opened up in the space where Work had been.

This is not about specifying any particular way of life, but about settling who we are to our own satisfaction and fulfilment, rather than living to please or impress others, or just to keep them off our backs. In the end, it is a matter of being true to oneself; that includes drawing the line at those things in life that seek to take us over, to define us solely in their own terms, to the neglect of who we really are. It is not narcissistic to try to find a stable balance between our obligations to others and a delimitation of our own rightful individuality. All the more so when those others believe they can invade so much of our lives that there is nothing left for ourselves – and most of all at times of need.

Teachers spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about their students’ life chances; in reality, we might achieve better results by helping and encouraging more people to think harder about their own – and hopefully redefining them as something more than the live-to-work outlook that can do such harm.  I hope my friend is reading.