Excessive

Very few vices are vices in any amount. Most things that we consider vices are only such if they’re done excessively.

It’s not a vice to brag, only to brag too much. You can drink moderately, care about your appearance, have some ice cream, and chase a little money. You can do all of those things without them becoming vices.

But especially when it comes to the appearance of vice – namely, what our peers think of us – people seem often very afraid of being seen indulging even once. Why?

A big part of it, I think, is that we’ve changed who we consider our “peers.”

As we move into more and more “deliberate” and online communities instead of our local and circumstantial ones, there’s a sort of “tiny window” effect. If you consider your literal next-door neighbor your peer and talk to them every day, then that neighbor actually gets a pretty accurate picture of you. If you come home drunk one night it will look different to them than if you come home drunk every night. If you proudly brag about your big accomplishment over the picket fence to them one day, that will sound different than you proudly bragging about every little thing all the time. As such, your occasional vices aren’t likely to form an image in your neighbor’s mind that’s an over-exaggeration of your worst features, ignoring the moderation.

But be honest – you can name more celebrities than you can people who live on your street. Who you view as your “peers” has become less and less the people who see you every day and more and more the people who only get a curated view of you. They see you through a “tiny window” that only shows cultivated snippets. Through this window, every aspect of you looks like it’s all of you. If you make a post bragging about something, the people who read that post don’t have a long series of non-bragging normal interactions to hold in comparison.

As a result, people are more concerned about anything they do being “taken out of context” (and with good reason!), so more and more what they communicate is sanitized and curated with an exact image in mind. And there’s nothing wrong with that – as long as that world is just a world you visit, or use professionally, or keep light.

But more and more, people live there. They live in apartments or communities where they’ve never said a single word to a single neighbor. They don’t have any friends that live within a hundred miles. Their tribes have become entirely fictional, distant things with no real meaning in their lives. They may have thousands of people who feel the same way about issues that will never actually affect their lives, but not one person from whom they could borrow a cup of sugar.

That – like all vices – is very bad when excessive.