Your brain works just as well whether you’re wearing a suit or stretchy pants
“How good it is when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this is the dead body of a bird or pig... How good these perceptions are at getting to the heart of the real thing and penetrating through it, so you can see it for what it is!
This should be your practice throughout all your life: when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves.”
—Marcus Aurelius
Your Michelin-starred meal is a bunch of dead plants and animals.
Your marble countertops are old rock.
And your fitted suit is sheep hair sewn into a business costume.
Work is in many ways performative, and I understand why. No one really knows what they’re doing and yet our ability to get things done rests on other people believing that we do—so we’ve created symbols of professionalism that we use to telegraph our competency.
It’s a tailored suit to look like what society tells us business people look like; the buzzword-y jargon we use to obscure our lack of clear thinking; our pre-meeting banter about being “back-to-back” all day in the hopes that looking like we’re in demand means we have something worth demanding.
But we need exactly none of it. Your brain works just as well whether you’re wearing a suit or stretchy pants.
And that’s great!
Because stretchy pants are fantastic.