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.

One of my go-to books during times of difficulty is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and I’m currently re-reading it. By no means a trite self-help book, it offers inspiring and challenging advice on using one’s life to the full.

The author is a world-renowned psychologist, and yet he seems almost unknown to lay audiences despite his having written several general-readership books, including the one mentioned above. His work has involved collaborations across the globe, into the nature of the most fulfilling experiences that people can experience. I suspect there are many millions more who could benefit from his insight.

The important message  – and my reason for mentioning it here – might be summed up as, “it’s not what you do, but the way that you do it” that makes all the difference to a fulfilled life; something that I think is also encapsulated in the spirit of Sprezzatura. It also seems to come as close as it is possible to, to justifying the claim that there are indeed ‘better’ and ‘worse’ ways of living life. The catch, of course, is that these are not necessarily to be found in the expected places. Above all, trying to conform to external criteria about what life ‘should’ be, is doomed to failure when it comes to personal satisfaction.

Csikszentmihalyi’s research found that the nature of profound human satisfaction does not differ very much across the world, even between extremely different cultures – though the ways in which it is achieved may do. The principal distinction is between things that are done for their intrinsic pleasure, and those that are done with an expectation of external pay-back. Flow and drudgery can be found in the same activity; the distinction comes from the motivation and mindset involved. The book is not excessively judgemental of modern society, but it does lament the extent to which modern life, attitudes and behaviours have been increasingly driven by precisely such external interests – and correlates it with human beings’ failure to grow life-satisfaction by anything like as much as they have their material wealth.

Flow arises when having an ‘optimal experience’, to which Csikszentmihalyi gives the name “autotelic” – in other words, an activity which is its own goal or purpose; a matter, perhaps, of the journey being the destination. In the state of flow, a number of things happen, including total absorption to the extent of losing one’s conscious sense of self, and the loss of a sense of time. Also unimportant is any defined ‘reason’ for doing the activity: it is its own reason.

This is how, over time, people come to have complex experiences – in other words ones where the task is closely-matched to their competence, such that they experience neither the anxiety of inadequacy nor the boredom of under-challenge. Instead, they experience a rewarding sense of personal agency.

Another essential aspect of Flow is that the actions that create it have to be voluntary; if they are externally commanded, this puts us straight back in the realm of activities that are extrinsically defined. However, the strength of this concept is that almost no activity need be excluded; the secret is to define whatever one is doing on one’s own terms. Perhaps the most persuasive aspect of this comes from the way even people held in solitary confinement often redefine their situation in terms of tasks or challenges they set themselves to stop them losing hope or sanity. Even in the most extreme circumstances, the mind has the capacity to take control of its own actions and turn them to benefit.

The conundrum with Flow is that the more competent one becomes, the greater the demands need to be in order to maintain the required level of challenge. While this may seem unrewarding, it is actually the key benefit of the whole concept: in effect it defines the process of human growth. By accepting such challenges, we inevitably become better at things – and by doing so, we refine our understanding and appreciation in a way that moves us from ignoramus, through novice, to expert. But we still need to remember that the only way that works is to do this entirely for our own satisfaction, not for any kudos that it might bring.

And that brings us neatly back to the underpinning idea behind this blog: that almost everything in life is worth doing – but the greatest ‘worth’ comes not from just doing it any old how (as modern society often seems to suggest) but doing it well; from allowing our innate curiosity to guide us towards the niceties of life, where we increasingly refine both our competence and our appreciation of every aspect of life, simply for the self-satisfaction and personal affirmation that it brings. Thus, doing things well – that is with complexity, skill and deep appreciation – is nigh-on objectively better than doing them in a trivial, superficial and extrinsic way. Or than simply never engaging with them in the first place.

Sadly, modern attitudes to discrimination seem to have been misapplied here: those who become connoisseurs in their chosen fields often tend to be lambasted for their perceived elitism, rather than envied for the personal reward that deep appreciation and expertise can bring. Or maybe it is that they are seen and envied for somehow being superhuman, when all they have done is apply a mindset and technique that is actually available to everyone. The error is to judge them according to perceived societal (i.e. extrinsic) values, rather than appreciate that the whole point of deep appreciation and skill is not the acclaim it can bring, but the internal reward of just doing something well. The fact that Flow can be found in almost anything – even something as mundane as doing the housework – comes down to the way one approaches it, rather than the inherent nature of activity itself.

Those who look on, perhaps criticising the perceived, apparent ‘superiority’ of people who make this journey while never bothering to do so themselves, will never begin to understand by just how much they are missing the point. The point of Flow is definitively not to impress; just to lead a satisfying life. Modern life (even in lockdown) can be dull, trivial and pointless – but it doesn’t have to be; all the difference lies in our heads.

In times like these, when we cannot be sure what even the practicalities of life will be like twelve months’ from now, it’s not surprising that there is much debate about what life more generally might be like in future. Writing in the latest edition of Prospect Magazine, the Archbishop of Canterbury calls for a renewed appreciation of the interdependence of people everywhere. More or less what you might expect the nation’s senior cleric to be saying – but Justin Welby is a rather more grounded individual than some of his predecessors, having worked in industry before moving into the Cloth.

It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that he quotes from a recent book by Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England. Carney mentions an encounter with Pope Francis, who told him, “Your job is to turn the market back into humanity”. Carney develops this theme and discusses how the ‘market economy’ has increasingly become a ‘market society’ in which things essential to a fulfilled life, such as beauty, happiness, joy and relationships have been either marginalised or commodified. For many, life has become the functional exercise in economic rationality that classical economics always pretended it is; anywhere where life is lived solely for its financial efficiency or expediency, this is in effect the case. Anywhere where non-earning life is spent in ‘recreational’ expenditure, the same force has taken hold. Imagination, culture and creativity do not often put food on the table.

I suppose that Sprezzatura blog was started to express my instinctive recoil from this. I have always found that the things that make life worth living, as opposed to tolerating, are far more diverse than those which figure in a purely economic sense. I have always been at a loss to comprehend the many who seem to find agency and self-fulfilment only in employment. Certainly, the wider experience of purposeful work can contribute many things to our lives beyond the simple meeting of economic necessity – but is that all there is to it? Over the years, I have been left with the impression that such people put so much of their time, effort and attention into their work that they inevitably neglect the rest of their lives, the things that might make them “rounded human beings”, equally competent in all aspects of their being. Even their earnings (and what they can be used for) seem of little consequence compared with the act of acquiring them. But what, fundamentally, is the point of living to work?

Bertrand Russell observed that ‘work’ is a construct devised in order to occupy people; there is truth (and probably necessity) in this. He also suggested that its effect has been to quash the necessity of devising more constructive and enjoyable ways of spending our time. He was not precious about this, emphasising the importance of play as well as highbrow activities. He argued that the constructive use of leisure is one of humanity’s last big challenges – but avoiding the issue simply leaves us facing a life of relatively meaningless toil. True, the rewards of work can be wider than this, but for many, the reality is that they spend more of their lives enriching others (not only materially) than they do themselves.

I wonder why this is acceptable. Perhaps the national mindset has something to do with it – and in recent decades, that has indeed placed Work on the high altar of life’s purposes. The expected decrease in workload that was to derive from modern technology has not happened; the work has simply changed in nature. What’s more, cutbacks may have imposed greater loads on those who remain. But I fail to understand those who, it seems, will sacrifice almost any other aspect of their lives for their work.

My mind is still troubled by the notion that so much of that effort has often gone into the furtherance of people other than ourselves, many of whom show no intention of neglecting their own lives, even as they expect that of us. I don’t see it as selfish or narcissistic to assert our own value as human beings, or to ensure that our own lives flourish too: “Attend to your own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs”.

In economic terms, the capital we accrue for others yields far greater returns that the labour that we provide does for us; even in the public sector, executive pay in health and education has pulled away from that of the mainstream workforce, to the extent that I conclude that this is a functional consequence of the quasi-privatisation process. An equitable deal it is not, without our having to give them our souls as well.

All of which led to a certain reaction recently, when it was suggested that the concept of ‘the Good Life’ which Sprezzatura promotes, is self-indulgent; even rather narcissistic.

I’m not quite sure what is so wrong with the idea of a good life. I wonder if the suspicion is a hangover of the Protestant Ethic that still seems to drive our attitude to work – perhaps coupled with the class-memory of a long-hierarchical society: Life is not meant for enjoying; not if you are Us, anyhow.

I would be the first to agree that defining life only in material terms is likely to be unsatisfying and shallow. There has been enough observation of status anxiety to suggest that people who pursue fulfilment via this route rarely find it. Human psychology dictates that material possessions lose their early allure, and the only chance of rediscovering the buzz of ownership comes from buying more, of being perpetually dissatisfied. What’s more, it is all too easy to confuse the motives: where ownership of desirable possessions is perceived as the measure of both personal credibility and social standing, it is all too easy to be swept up into the cycle of mindless, competitive consumption.

I don’t think that scenario really meets the definition of a fulfilled life. But I should add, I don’t think we should feel unduly guilty about material possessions either – provided they are owned knowingly, and for the ‘right’ reasons. While they cannot bring us limitless reward, ownership of genuinely-treasured things can still make an appreciable difference to our lives.

William Morris captured it when he wrote, “Have nothing in your house which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”. Substitute “house” for “life” and we might have something to guide us here. The important thing is not the status that possessions (whether material or not) may bring, but the joy they can (with limitations) add to our lives, when defined purely by our own criteria. This is not narcissism, but an honest appreciation of that which enhances us.

I lack sympathy equally with those who go out to work in order to stuff their lives with status symbols, those who are too busy working to notice or care what occupies the rest of their lives – and those who deny that any kind of personal comfort or other active choice is anything other than the work of the devil.

It is true, material possessions alone do not do the job. A useful concept here comes from Aristotle:  Eudaimonia, or the concept of flourishing. That word helpfully encapsulates all those things that can lead to human development and growth, including both material enjoyment, but also the non-material values mentioned by Carney. Denying the validity of any of those things only risks diminishing our lives from what they could be in one aspect or another – and for me, Sprezzatura is the vaccine against such risks.

While the word originally refers to an approach to (male) fashion, it has wider implications for the care we devote to our lives, without becoming hidebound by externally-dictated practices. It is also notable that sprezzatura does not define a specific style, so much as the bending of the rules according to unique personal interpretation, in order to please ourselves.

It is true that sprezzatura can become narcissism, as the Peacocks of the Pitti fashion fairs show – but this is because they have lost sight of the spirit of the thing: they are out only to attract attention.

True sprezzatura, I would argue, is better balanced; it is certainly concerned with the effect that one has on the world around us – but its real motive is self-expression. Why else would it have that rebellious streak?

Recent psychological research has suggested that there are in fact two kinds of narcissism: that which really is the expression of people who love themselves just too much – and a (perhaps more common) type, which is in reality the over-compensation of those who suffer from low self-worth. I think this is a critical distinction when it comes to reading and even judging those who appear to suffer from narcissism.

All of which might leave us wondering where a reasonable balance might be found, between self-indulgence and self-denial.

There are, no doubt, as many ideas of what makes a fulfilled life as there are human beings. For all that this blog advances certain preferences, it is not its place to criticise those who have different tastes or ideas. The real problem is not those who have a different idea of fulfilment, so much as those who have none. Lives that appear empty, where external validations such as work are the only reason to live them.

Yet who am I to judge whose they might be, or what they might do about it?

The opposite of Eudaimonia is presumably some kind of emptiness, lassitude or decline: the sort of experience that has seemed common during the Pandemic lockdowns. For all our diversity, homo sapiens seems to have some fairly universal basic needs. Amongst those might be social contact and a sense of purpose, and recent times have widely challenged these things. I would go further and suggest that there is something approaching an objective measure of these things’ impact – namely our state of mental (and to some extent physical) health: more things that seem to have suffered during the past year. I also suggest that those who have a richer internal sense of self may have been better equipped to deal with such challenges. Their ‘purpose’ is their own, ongoing lives in all their facets – and those have never deserted us.

Those fundamental needs represent both a challenge and a threat. The latter because their neglect can lead us down the rabbit-holes of poor wellbeing, and the former because it may well be their constructive, autonomous cultivation that provides the sense of eudaimonia that we need to be fully well.

In simple terms, we have to eat – so we might as well make it something to be actively relished as a joyous part of life: food not just fuel. We need shelter, so we might as well make our homes places where we can feel safe, comfortable and rested. We need to dress, so we might as well do so with imagination and style, that both expresses our personalities and tastes and hopefully brighten the day of those we meet. We need to placate our restless minds – so we might as well make it fulfilling.

And so it goes on. If life is worth living, it is worth living well – both for the moment-by-moment satisfaction of doing things to our satisfaction, and for the personal growth that developing such competence and (self-) knowledge brings. That requires active reflection and discernment – things that take the time that work all too often precludes. We can make of our internal lives as much or as little as we choose, no matter what our outward circumstances. That does include their material dimension – for we cannot attend to those inner needs without attending to their outward expressions.

Neither need we pretend that it is easy; life is never smooth for long. My own recent experience shows that the possession of a ‘good life’ is not always sufficient to prevent difficult times; but I am still absolutely convinced that the same good life is part of the antidote to those difficulties. Without holding on tight to the things in life that I truly value, I would have struggled much more with the challenges of recent months and years; I would have had no Pole Star on which to focus while the currents of poor mental health pushed me hither and thither.

I cannot claim, therefore, that sprezzatura is a failsafe vaccine against adversity; but its apparent absence from people’s lives is, I suggest, indicative of something. The neglect of the basic aspects and needs of one’s life speak of individuals and society that ultimately places a low priority on its own eudaimonia. That they often splurge on meaningless consumerism, externalising their search for happiness in the act of Purchasing, is just the other side of that inner void. That, to me, is akin to having lost any sense of the meaning of life – and poor health can sometimes be the all-too-real confirmation of that. It is easy to make the fundamental mistake of thinking that both eudaimonia and sprezzatura can only have material manifestations, whereas in reality all the non-material aspects of life are at least as important, just not as visible. My understanding of sprezzatura incudes the mind as well as the body, hence many of the topics covered in this blog.

Those who look on with a protestant sense of denial or disapproval are ultimately making their own choices. But it’s worth remembering that perceptions vary around the world: there is no absolute standard for either fulfilment or narcissism. So too does the joy with which different cultures live; I am not only thinking of the original Italian version here (Latin (ex-)Catholicism comes with its own hefty dollops of sorrow) – but it is perhaps about effects which various attitudes can bring to our lives. To what extent are people following different routes really happy? At least in a secular sense, that is the only criterion that matters. I accept that true narcissism is perhaps not really a route to happiness – but I am not sure that the self-denying, empty functionalism of other lives is really any better.

I suspect that inferiority-narcissism is indeed more prevalent than the truly self-aggrandising type. And I don’t think it is harmful. Our eudaimonia might even benefit from rather more of it. The consequence not letting it loose is the prospect of undervaluing our own lives simply because of received or imposed expectations of meaning and appropriateness, and living them less than fully, simply through fear or guilt of having higher expectations of what they might be.

Hopefully, the empty, consumerist rat-race of recent decades has now been shown for what it was: in the end, other things mattered more. That better future cannot only refer to material consumption, and not to work-as-life either. It needs to refer to a more holistic and balanced understanding of what makes a good life, of living every aspect of it to the full. The important thing is that people think for themselves about what that might mean. But unappreciative denial of the good things in life – wherever they come from – is surely not part of it.