Do Not Be Misled by Society’s Race

When we are young, it is hard not to be swept along by society’s expectations.

This is not a failing of the young. Moving from school into society is, by its nature, a process of learning social rules and finding a place within an existing order. Study, work, earn money, get promoted, buy a home, start a family. Move to a bigger city, join a better organisation, live in a more expensive house, see more of the world. Society already has a recognisable set of standards for success. We need only follow the path laid out for us.

Few young people stop to ask who established these standards or why they are worth pursuing. When everyone around you is heading in the same direction, it is easy to mistake what everyone wants for what is truly valuable.

By middle age, even if we are still in the race, we may begin to gain a little psychological distance from it. Jobs, incomes, homes and titles still matter in practical terms, but they no longer command the overwhelming importance they once did. Later, especially as we gradually step away from the fiercest professional competition, we may finally see that the track society has placed us on is not a natural feature of the world. Much of it has been shaped by economic structures, business models, social habits and collective imagination.

Tall buildings and property prices offer a clear example.

There are genuine economic reasons why cities initially grow upwards. Concentrations of jobs, commerce, schools, hospitals and public facilities attract more people. As the population grows, central land becomes scarce, and buildings rise to accommodate more activity within a limited area. Housing prices follow a similar logic. Many people want to live close to jobs and public resources; competition for the same locations drives prices up.

The problem emerges as this process continues.

More people bring a concentration of resources; more resources attract more people. A growing population makes land more expensive, and expensive land makes dense development more profitable, drawing still more capital, facilities and businesses into the area. What began as an economically efficient concentration gradually becomes a system that reinforces itself.

Eventually, people are no longer seeking only the opportunities a place offers. They begin to pursue the very idea of being at the centre.

At first, homes were expensive because there were more opportunities nearby. Later, the reasoning becomes: because homes here are expensive, this must be a superior place.

Cause and effect have been reversed in people’s minds.

More skyscrapers seem to mean greater modernity; higher house prices seem to mean greater prosperity. Living on a higher floor can even seem to imply a higher position in life. Residents may feel proud simply because housing in their city is expensive. Yet for someone who needs a place to live, a higher price means, first of all, exchanging more years of income for the same amount of living space. That is not inherently something to celebrate.

Nor should “artificially created scarcity” be understood simply as someone deliberately withholding land. Something deeper is happening. Society keeps concentrating jobs, schools, hospitals, transport, cultural facilities and business opportunities in a few areas, then presents those areas as the places where an ideal life can be found. What is scarce is often not land itself, but land invested with social value.

If transport, public services, water and electricity networks, and employment extended more evenly into surrounding areas, many people would not need to crowd into a handful of centres. But once everyone believes that “this is where opportunity and the future lie”, scarcity takes on a social dimension.

Commercial society is particularly good at one thing: it does not simply meet human needs, but continually adds new meanings to them.

A home is no longer just somewhere to live. It must come with the right location, school catchment, view, floor, brand and status. A car must do more than get us around; it must signal success. Clothes must express taste as well as cover the body. Coffee can become an entire way of life rather than merely a drink.

Markets produce dreams as well as goods.

They keep telling us what counts as a good home, a good school, an international outlook, success, sophistication and refined living. Over time, we develop much the same set of expectations, then compete for the things we have come to imagine as the ingredients of an ideal life.

Tourism makes this mechanism particularly visible.

At its simplest, travel means leaving familiar surroundings to experience nature, cities and different ways of living elsewhere, giving the body and mind a change.

But travel, too, has gradually acquired a set of standard answers.

In Paris, you must see the Eiffel Tower. In New York, Times Square. In Sydney, the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and Bondi Beach. During holidays, people know these places will be packed, the roads congested, accommodation expensive and parking difficult. There may no longer be any room to enjoy the scenery quietly. Yet they still go to the same places at the same time.

Often, they are no longer pursuing travel entirely for its own sake. They are completing a template of what travel is supposed to look like.

Driving through many parts of Australia has made this particularly clear to me.

Sydney is certainly beautiful, and Bondi is certainly a fine beach. It is conveniently located, with an established beach culture and a history of its own. But in terms of natural scenery alone, it has no magical quality unique to that spot. Australia’s long coastline has thousands of beaches. Many have clearer water, wider sands, no high-rise buildings nearby and no crowds. Judged purely by the experience of nature, some are even more beautiful than the famous beaches.

Yet the vast majority of tourists never visit them.

Not because they are unattractive, but because they have not become part of the shared story.

“I went to Bondi” already carries social meaning. “I spent an afternoon on a little beach somewhere on the South Coast whose name I don’t know” offers almost nothing to show off about. In terms of a person’s actual physical and mental experience, however, the latter may well be better.

This is an intriguing mismatch in modern life.

We think we are choosing scenery, when often we are choosing scenery that others have already chosen for us. We think we are experiencing life, when sometimes we are simply ticking off a list society prepared in advance.

The same thing happens in education, exercise and consumption.

Study begins as a way to gain knowledge, but qualifications can become a form of status. Running begins with the body’s need for movement, then acquires marathons, equipment, finishing times and race histories. If someone enjoys running a few kilometres each day and feels good doing it, the activity is straightforward enough. But if it gradually becomes necessary to enter a particular race, beat a particular time or own a particular pair of shoes and watch—otherwise the exercise feels somehow incomplete—another layer of social meaning has been wrapped around it.

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with any of these things.

Tall buildings are not wrong. Prestigious schools are not wrong. Neither are Bondi or marathons.

The question is whether we are using them or allowing them to define us.

It is also worth considering how short-lived many of the things an era pursues so intensely turn out to be. They do not grow directly out of basic human needs. They are shaped by the economic structures, technologies, business models and social psychology of a particular time, and bear its unmistakable imprint.

One era sees skyscrapers as the symbol of modernisation; another may turn back towards lower-density living, natural surroundings and walkable neighbourhoods. One era treats large shopping centres as signs of prosperity; with the rise of online shopping, those commercial centres may quickly decline. A profession everyone once competed to enter may lose its standing as industries change. Goods that once signalled status can soon lose that symbolism when they become widely available.

This suggests that much of what we call “prestigious”, “modern” or “successful” has no stable intrinsic value.

These are simply the interpretations of life offered by a particular era.

Every so often, society introduces a new set of standards. When each first appears, it seems enormously important. We may even feel that failing to keep up means being left behind by our time. Looking back twenty or thirty years later, many of these things may seem utterly ordinary, or even faintly ridiculous.

What changes less quickly is the human being.

Human ways of living have been transformed, but our basic biological make-up and psychological needs have not changed at the same pace. We still need sunlight, air, food, sleep, movement and safety. We also need relationships, respect, freedom, curiosity, creativity and meaning. Thousands of years ago, love brought people joy and loss brought them pain. The same is true today.

What has become extraordinarily abundant in modern society is the packaging around those basic needs.

That packaging can be combined and rearranged endlessly, making the world appear dazzlingly varied. New cities, products, journeys, sports, identities and lifestyles keep appearing. Young people entering this world can easily be carried along by its apparent richness, believing that the more they experience, the more they own and the closer they stay to the crest of the wave, the more fully they have lived.

But the crest is always moving.

Once it may have been land, official rank and family pedigree. Later it became qualifications, cities, careers and wealth. Now it may be online attention, experiences, body management, cultural taste and the supposedly ideal life.

Most people cannot remain on that crest forever. Even if they reach it today, the standards may change tomorrow.

What age can genuinely offer, then, is not so much a renunciation of worldly life as a measure of distance.

When we are young, we have to enter society and learn its rules. Later, we need to examine those rules again.

What actually improves my life, and what have I merely been told to pursue? What has practical value, and what is only a social symbol attached to it? What do I genuinely enjoy, and what am I doing because everyone else is doing it and I am afraid of falling behind?

Real freedom does not mean leaving the everyday world behind. No one can step entirely outside society.

Real freedom means continuing to live in this world while gradually learning to distinguish what the world says you should want from what you actually need.