A Culture of Comfort
Sam Sykes ~ 11/13/2025
At Work
What happened to suits in the office? Hell, what happened to business casual? At this point the men and women going into the office for work can get by with a pair of jeans with no holes and any shirt that doesn’t say “fuck” on it. The rise of the tech industry started the trend of casual clothing, mainly because these nerds became accustomed to essentially living at the office in a race to beat other startups. It made sense for antisocial weirdos who were totally engulfed in their work for 16+ hours a day. But for some reason, whenever Silicon Valley adopts a new work style, regular American offices think they can copy the same culture and achieve the same results. The issue is that most American offices are full of regular people with families, baseball games to coach, hobbies to cultivate, and a vacation planned for all next week. A far cry from the autistic guy that does not only enjoy his work, or thinks programming is fun, but embodies the industry and lives to work. The casual nature of his work attire does not magically make him a more efficient worker or inspire maximum effort, it is merely a consequence of it. Mountain Dew Code Red and Code Sprints are a way of life for these guys.
The truth is, business leaders have adopted the business casual policy purely as a form of justifying themselves as agents of change within an organization. In mimicking the business practices of tech juggernauts like Amazon, Nvidia, Meta (Facebook), Google, and many others, C-suite douchebags validate their existences by adopting the policies of successful companies that are not the things that led to success in the first place.
While clothes may seem to be unimportant when completing mundane office tasks, it signals a change in the culture of America. It should be argued that casual expectations of appearance and professional presentation can lead to lower morale, confidence, and productivity. No one is asking a regular accountant in the office to become the Wolf of Wall Street, but maybe taking pride in personal appearance can lead to more pride in his work.
At Home
Now we know that working from home leads to higher productivity, presumably because any time spent not working is automatically converted into leisure time, as opposed to time in the office, that almost begs to be wasted. So let’s be clear, I don’t think you need to wear a suit when teleworking alone. That would be absurd, but there is something to be said for sacrificing at least a little comfort while at home.
I know very few people who do not immediately initiate a wardrobe change as soon as they arrive home. The impulsive need to free yourself from the publicly acceptable attire as soon as you cross the threshold is almost epidemic. A home is no longer just a place for living, it is a place for maximum, mind-numbing comfort. The Matrix may be an overdone analogy perverted by the incessant commentary on the parallels to today, but here goes nothing. For the three readers that have never heard of The Matrix, it is essentially a movie about the human population of Earth being held in these pods full of warm orange goo and hooked up to all kinds of feeding tubes and breathing apparatuses. The humans of course, do not know this, as they are living in a simulated world with one another. So the mind is active, but captive. The body is alive and well, but dormant. Right now, we live in what is almost a voluntary version of The Matrix. The movie asserts that despite the comfort and bliss of ignorance, the simulated world is not where we would want to live, and that the human spirit would go to great lengths and fight huge battles just to escape it. Right now, people go into their perfectly climate-controlled homes (orange goo), change into the loosest, softest, and warmest clothing possible (also orange goo), fire up the television or PlayStation (Simulated world), order doordash (feeding tubes), and stare entranced at a screen for hours and hours. Peak comfort.
I write this not to abhor all creature comforts of the modern world, lose clothes, gaming, and food delivery all have their place in a moderate to limited fashion. The issue is the hedonistic dereliction of duty to oneself that comfort presents. It is not good to be a gooey blob staring at a bunch of pulsing pixels for hours uninterrupted by even the smallest of challenges or tasks.
Public
The burning desire of everyone to throw on a pair of sweats or shorts the minute they step into their house is made even more ridiculous when you see what they are dying to change out of. It’s not like men are wearing a suit and tie all day and women have makeup done, hair perfect, while donning colorful dresses, it’s quite the opposite. We’ll start with women, who are not the worst offenders.
While the women of yesterday used to take great pride in their appearances, today is different. If we exclude the purple-hair lunatics, bonneted welfare queens, and sumo wrestler chicks, we at least see some attempts at femininity and beauty. It’s true that the nicest a modern woman will dress is in jeans and a sweater, and that any woman wearing a dress almost looks clownish, but at least the normal ones seem to try a little. Sweatpants are still all too pervasive but at least they are not as bad as modern men.
What is a man supposed to project to the public? That’s probably too vague a question, but what comes to mind is competence, confidence, and the capacity for self defense, to name a few. The main thing you want to see from men is that everything is safe and being taken care of. When I look around and see men in Birkenstocks with flabby bellies pushing out from underneath their graphic T-shirts, it’s a sad state of affairs. Is comfort really worth looking incredibly ineffectual? Open-toed shoes are for women, plain and simple, a man should never want to fight, but always be prepared too, and flip-flops or chick shoes are not designed for combat. Is it really so much more uncomfortable to make sure every shirt you wear in public has a collar or is made of something besides polyester? The modern man is out of shape and dressed like shit.
Another odd phenomenon in public right now is on full display anywhere you have to wait for longer than 30 seconds. Waiting for a train, sitting in the doctor's waiting room, even between plays at a football game, stimulation is mandatory and the phones come out. Never to do anything of consequence, mind you, checking X… answering a Snapchat… Push Notification “Government Shutdown enters its —” Train is here, doctor is in, ball is snapped. Filling dead air with hunched shoulders and staring at the mobile version of “a bunch pulsing pixels” is a weird way to live. Everyone is more connected with each other through a phone than sitting at the same bar with a stool between them. Sad. I have been encouraged however by the (albeit an internet fad after all) trend of “rawdogging a flight or life”. That doesn’t mean you walk around life fucking everything without a condom, but to actively and thoughtfully forgoing screens and headphones as you complete tasks and/or embrace boredom. The result can be calming, increases in focus, clarity of tasks, and a sense of meaning.
Conclusion
I guess to sum it all up, I would say “why not care just a little bit?”. It doesn’t hurt to look good, even if a tie is mildly annoying. Think about all the time you have wasted eating garbage and sitting down while locked in on a screen for hours. Is it really healthy for you? Could you be doing something better with the hours you are flushing down the toilet? When you are in public, think about the image you would like to convey to society about yourself. If you dress like a gay nerd with flip-flops, an ironic t-shirt, and way too short shorts, don’t be surprised when strangers treat you like one. Respect can be destroyed way faster than it can be cultivated. Let’s take just a little care.
