There was a time—and I realize this makes me sound like I’m about to tell you how far I had to walk to school in the snow—when leaving the house was an event. Not a grand occasion, necessarily, but something that required preparation, consideration, maybe even a little respect for the fact that you were about to share space with other human beings.

You couldn’t just roll out of bed and shuffle to the grocery store in your pajamas without people assuming you’d either suffered a complete mental breakdown or escaped from some sort of institution. Going out meant getting dressed. Actually dressed. With real pants and shoes that had laces and everything.

Now I watch people navigate the world like they’re still in their living rooms, and I can’t decide if we’ve achieved some kind of liberation or if we’ve just given up entirely on the idea that other people matter.

When Public Meant Something

Look at old photographs of baseball games from the 1940s and ’50s. The men are wearing suits and ties. Hats—actual hats, not baseball caps worn backwards by guys old enough to know better. The women are dressed like they’re going somewhere important, because they were. Going to a ball game was an occasion, something worth dressing up for.

It wasn’t just special events either. Going to work, to school, even to the corner store—these required what we used to call “public clothes.” The idea was simple: when you stepped outside your private space, you entered a shared space, and that came with certain unwritten obligations. You owed it to your fellow citizens to make an effort.

This wasn’t about fashion or showing off wealth. It was about respect—for yourself, sure, but more importantly, for everyone else who had to look at you. It was an acknowledgment that we’re all in this together, that your choices affect other people, that civilization is a collective effort that requires individual consideration.

The Comfort Revolution

Somewhere along the way, we decided that comfort trumped everything else. Personal comfort became the highest virtue, the organizing principle around which all other considerations revolved. Why wear real pants when sweatpants are more comfortable? Why bother with shoes when flip-flops will do? Why dress for others when you can dress for yourself?

And I get it, I really do. Comfort is nice. Nobody enjoys being uncomfortable. But when did we decide that our personal comfort was more important than the comfort of everyone around us? When did we conclude that the right to be relaxed superseded the obligation to be considerate?

You see it everywhere now. People wearing pajama bottoms to the airport, flip-flops to restaurants, workout clothes to everywhere except actual workouts. The grocery store has become an extension of their bedroom, the sidewalk an extension of their couch. The boundary between private and public has dissolved, and we’re all living in one big, sloppy, underdressed family room.

The Death of Please and Thank You

But it’s not just the clothes—though the clothes are certainly a symptom. It’s the entire erosion of what used to be called common courtesy. The small rituals that made sharing space with strangers tolerable, even pleasant.

Please and thank you used to be reflexive, automatic responses that required no thought but conveyed basic human recognition. Now you’re lucky to get a grunt of acknowledgment when someone hands you your change or holds a door. Eye contact has become optional. Acknowledgment of other people’s existence seems to require a special effort that most people can’t be bothered to make.

Men used to give up their seats for women, not because women couldn’t stand but because it was a small gesture that acknowledged shared humanity. Now everyone sits with their bags on empty seats, creating personal fortresses that ward off any possibility of human interaction.

Holding doors was standard operating procedure, a tiny moment of consideration that cost nothing but said, “I see you, I acknowledge that you exist, and I’ll spend two seconds of my life making yours slightly easier.” Now people let doors slam in faces and act surprised when anyone notices.

The Japanese Alternative

Travel to Japan and you’ll see what we’ve lost. There, the idea of inconveniencing others is still considered a kind of moral failing. People bow when they answer their phones in public, apologizing in advance for the disruption. They eat quietly, speak softly, move through shared spaces with a constant awareness that their actions affect everyone around them.

It’s not oppressive—it’s liberating. When everyone agrees to prioritize the collective comfort over individual impulse, public spaces become pleasant rather than stressful. You don’t have to steel yourself for rudeness because rudeness is simply not acceptable. You don’t have to navigate around someone’s sprawling personal territory because the concept doesn’t exist.

But here in America, we’ve made individual expression and personal comfort into sacred rights that supersede all other considerations. The result is a public sphere that feels increasingly like a collection of private bubbles, each person operating according to their own rules with no regard for anyone else’s experience.

The Headphone Nation

Nothing symbolizes this better than the universal adoption of headphones as standard public equipment. Everyone’s plugged in, tuned out, and completely disconnected from the shared experience of being human in public.

I understand the appeal. The world is loud and annoying, and your playlist is probably better than whatever ambient noise surrounds you. But when everyone is wrapped in their own private audio cocoon, we stop being a community and become just a collection of individuals who happen to be occupying the same physical space.

You see it on trains, where people sprawl across seats with their bags, their feet, their entire personal ecosystem, completely oblivious to the fact that other people might need to sit down. They’re not being malicious—they’re just not being anything. They’re not present, not aware, not participating in the basic social contract that makes public transportation tolerable.

The New Public Etiquette

We’ve developed a new kind of public behavior that prioritizes individual comfort above all else. People eat smelly food on subway cars, conduct loud phone conversations in quiet spaces, treat public areas like extensions of their private domains. The idea that your behavior might affect others seems genuinely foreign to many people.

It’s not that they’re necessarily selfish—though some certainly are. It’s that they’ve internalized the idea that public space is just private space with more people in it. They dress like they’re at home because they feel like they’re at home. They act like they’re alone because they’ve trained themselves not to see anyone else.

The smartphone revolution completed the transformation. Now everyone has a personal entertainment system, communication device, and escape hatch from reality right in their pocket. You can be physically present but mentally somewhere else entirely, and most people choose somewhere else.

The Cost of Comfort

What we’ve gained in personal comfort, we’ve lost in communal experience. Public life has become a series of individual performances rather than a shared endeavor. We’re all starring in our own little movies, and everyone else is just background scenery.

The old rules weren’t perfect—they often reinforced outdated hierarchies and stifling social expectations. But they served a purpose: they made sharing space with strangers less stressful by creating predictable patterns of behavior. When everyone knew the rules, everyone knew what to expect.

Now the only rule is that there are no rules, and the result is a kind of social chaos that leaves everyone slightly on edge all the time. You never know if the person next to you is going to respect your space or sprawl into it, speak quietly or broadcast their phone conversation to the entire train car.

The Loneliness of Public Life

The irony is that in making public life more comfortable for ourselves as individuals, we’ve made it less comfortable for ourselves as a society. We’re surrounded by people but increasingly isolated from them. We’re more connected than ever through technology but less connected through the basic human courtesies that used to bind communities together.

Maybe this is just the price of progress. Maybe individual expression and personal comfort are more important than the old social rituals that kept us considerate of each other. Maybe I’m just another old guy complaining about changes that are ultimately for the better.

But I can’t help thinking we’ve lost something valuable in our rush to prioritize personal comfort over communal consideration. The public sphere used to be a place where we practiced being citizens, where we learned to balance individual needs against collective well-being.

Now it’s just a place where we go to be alone together, each wrapped in our own private universe, dressed like we never left home because, in all the ways that matter, we never really did.