Around 2009, I was still in school, waiting for the school bus to leave on schedule. My usual habit was to find a snack, sit down with friends, and talk about everything boys talk about.

Then my best friend, who is still my best friend now, said:

“I have to go. My mother has arrived.”

We waved. He walked toward a car I had never seen before. Not a bus, not a sedan, not an SUV. A comfortable car, not large, modest in size. And its door slid open on its own. My friend stepped in, and it drove off.

That car was an MPV: the Toyota Alphard.

If you have visited Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, you will have seen plenty of them. And the symbolism is usually the same. It is the car of the upper middle class.

The family that made it in capitalism.

Not necessarily billionaires, but with enough to hire a private chauffeur and spare a down payment of around thirty-five thousand dollars.

That Alphard, the one I watched my best friend step into, has stayed with me ever since. It is the state I have lived in until this day: the man in between.

Have you heard the phrase so near, yet so far?

For me, it is the fact that I physically stand, breathe, and live in the same space as my friend, whose family had an Alphard drive him every day. As the guests at a vintage watch event I once moderated, most of whom could effortlessly buy the Patek Philippe Golden Ellipse lying in the showcase. And I could not.

To see the life, the finer possibilities, in front of my own eyes for more than twenty years, and not yet reach it, creates an accumulated desire. Not purely discontent, and certainly not self-negative. An eagerness to transcend the social class, the status anxiety. Or, put precisely, the limitation I was born with.

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That was the line I heard from a friend and mentor as we sat beside a wide panel window, looking out at a waterfall over a cup of Americano. He is a very talented writer and storyteller, with one of the most unique voices I have ever encountered. But with the reality of capitalism, the arrival of AI, and every other reason on earth for brands to question the value of the creative mind more than ever, it was not a line that surprised me.

“Can’t we just use AI for this?”

“Why don’t you just prompt Claude with a line or two and do what it says?”

I have heard many versions of this from the efficiency-driven executive. I am no longer sure whether the integrity of human creation still matters to this economy. But I am certain it did its job of triggering something, in my friend and in me: a questioning of our reason to exist. As independent creative professionals in a hyper-optimised economy, and as humans.

Who are we, exactly?

For the past year I pursued an image: the creative director behind the scenes, an archetype that looks so cool, especially in European creative culture. Then I decided not to extend that role to one of my long-standing clients. The image, it turns out, was not for me. Not in how the work feels, and not in whether it leaves me fulfilled.

An idea I explored recently came back to me: the modern human has tied identity to performance. Job title. KPI. Income. Success. (And who defines success, anyway? The image that comes to mind is a Porsche 911 parked outside a house in Beverly Hills.)

I won’t deny the importance of monetary capital, particularly having enough of it that it can run on its own and turn into wealth. I think that is a noble pursuit, perhaps simply natural to human beings. But what I saw in my friend, the quiet overwhelm and the fracture in his sense of self after losing his channel to contribute to the capitalist machine, is worth investigating.

Someone once told me that we are always evolving. The self of last year is not the self of today, and the present self is not the future one. What once excited or provoked something in you will likely change over time.

Practising the flâneur, strolling through the city without attachment, letting the mind wander and trusting it to do the work, has always been my way of finding myself again. Through a hard stretch in a career, through the loss of connection within the metropolis, through the bombardment of screens, it all begins to quiet and vanish. Then the clarity arrives, a voice from nowhere, showing what comes next.

So I think it is an essential act though not an easy one.

To find oneself, to rediscover after a year, and to listen honestly to what comes back. As my friend and I do, once in a while.

The destination is likely to be something unfamiliar, something that brings discomfort and uncertainty. The grass over there might not be greener. But it is worth exploring.

To find oneself once again, especially in the turbulence of life.

For me it is the same view, differently.

Because when you put yourself inside the similarity — the repetitive behavior, in the exact same environment, over time — the thing turns mundane.

The view I am looking at has been in front of me plenty of times. It is arguably one of the iconic sights that represents the flair of Bangkok at its finest. Tropical greenery running through a decorated space. International-style towers. A high-ceilinged façade. Sunlight so stark it flattens everything underneath it.

A visitor might find this fascinating. I did, the first time.

And now it is just another ordinary sight.

The reason might simply be that there is no excitement, no spark, no freshness in the daily life anymore. Or at least that it is rarely experienced. Whether the explanation is neuroscientific — some shortage of dopamine from the absence of anything new — or just the plain fact that I have been inside the same routine, the same pattern, the same environment for a very long time.

Either way, I have realised something.

I need an escapade.

There is something romantic about starting the engine on impulse. Or booking a flight the moment the thought arrives, in the middle of an afternoon.

My own version was a 4 a.m. drive to the airport, with a nocturnal atmosphere reminiscent of Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice. Another was a coastal escape taken immediately after a client meeting, into a five-star hotel bizarrely close in feeling to the Ocean Club in the Bahamas from Casino Royale.

But the best one is not mine.

A friend of mine could not bear another loop of white-collar work and the drive home. So he started the engine of his 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle — a car whose steering wheel carries more weight than you could possibly imagine — and drove two hundred and twenty kilometres. He stayed one night. He drove back in the morning.

There was no destination in it. There was only the desire to be somewhere else.

And he came back a different person.

These things do something that ordinary life cannot. I do not know whether there is a proper term for it — the phenomenon of going somewhere you have never been, especially with no itinerary, when the entire sequence of thinking and executing takes less than an hour.

I have come to call it nervous system shock.

Because across the year, the mind gets conditioned. Familiar environments. Predictable routines. Repetitive identities. It begins operating on autopilot rather than through conscious engagement.

Changing the surroundings interrupts the brain’s habitual expectations. The unfamiliar place demands more attention than the familiar one, simply because it has not been catalogued yet. The grass is greener, the light is warmer, the noise is calmer — or it only seems that way, because you are finally looking.

And the freedom to act outside your usual obligations restores some sense of personal agency.

What follows is a temporary liberation from the identities and expectations your everyday surroundings keep reinforcing. You experience yourself differently. You experience the passage of time differently.

Perhaps that is why we return feeling like new people. Not because anything fundamental has changed — but because we have momentarily escaped the psychological machinery that makes a life feel repetitive, and rediscovered that our existence holds far more possibility than the routine would have us believe.

The funny thing is that the ordinary tempo of my own life has begun numbing my senses a little more each day. Which is a clear enough signal. A getaway is needed.

The first winds of the year arrive in Thailand within the next three weeks. That is what I am waiting for — the moment the coldest breeze touches the skin. Likely the only moment of the year it will.

Perhaps somewhere in the north.

Or perhaps, once I am finished with this piece, a quick drive to some random city nearby.

If only it were not a national holiday — when every road fills with metropolitan dwellers attempting precisely the same thing.

Sunday, 4:57 a.m. I was driving to a local park near my place, having arranged to meet a friend there. What surprised me were the cars — the lot already full.

At this very spot, four years ago, when I was training for a full marathon and came here for the weekend long run, there would have been sixty per cent of the spaces still empty at this hour. At first I thought it might be more forgiving further in. That the long line of cars stacked at the park entrance was an anomaly, and the real crowd would only arrive with the dawn.

I had it wrong.

I drove on to another lot with more space and secured a place there. My friend had already arrived in his silver BMW. We looked at each other and asked, without any words first:

What on earth is happening?

It is clear enough. A major global wave, and Bangkok is one of the cities that has taken it up entirely — mass-level health consciousness in urban civilian life.

Many have turned the volume down on alcohol. Running and community sport have become status symbols. For a certain set, this is simply the new cool thing in town. So it is no wonder that the park my friend and I thought of as private, a training ground for a 26.2-mile event, is now full of faces before sunrise.

There is also a word turning into a buzz in the social sphere here.

Longevity.

The purest meaning of it is something like remaining for an extended period. In this context: health span, and life span. Led, largely, by the nouveau riche of the twenty-first century — the body in the ice bath, the hyper-selected diet, the dozen pills taken daily, all of it documented.

I know how obsessive this can become. I was once the gym nerd tracking everything in MyFitnessPal, back in 2018.

But it leads me to something. The health-consciousness trend is a thing I have heard about for as long as my brain has been fully functioning. So the question is not whether it is new.

Running is a score. Eating is a score. Sleeping is a score. Posting all of it to Instagram and TikTok is another score.

Since when did longevity become this much?

Because whenever I look at figures like Ralph Lauren or Robert Redford, they seem to represent the opposite position within the same lane.

Of course they had means. They could afford excellent food, the advances in medicine, whatever supplements they wanted. They had more time and more capital than most people to put toward prioritising longevity at all.

But look at the old black-and-white images. Redford playing ping-pong with Paul Newman, shirtless on a summer day in the late 1960s. Ralph Lauren through the 1970s — the athletic life, the adventuring, on campaign and off it, with his family.

Those men turned longevity into a lifestyle. Not into a specimen to be optimised.

Redford passed away last year, which I was sorry to see. And Ralph Lauren, though he still appeared at the end of his recent womenswear show, is a reminder of the same thing: nobody escapes the biology.

It remains worth taking care of anyway.

So the matter is this. What do people actually want from the phrase taking care?

A 100-out-of-100 scoreboard of optimal checkmarks? Or simply a life well lived, sustainably?

There is no absolute answer, I am afraid.

If the goal is to defy death and hack the biology, then perhaps that is the great life, for the person who holds it.

But if it is not — then a brief moment of zooming out, and deciding what a great life means by one’s own definition, seems worth the trouble.

In my case, for now and onward, it is to preserve the longness of life. To extend the time these organs keep functioning — in order to keep seeing how things evolve, to keep finding interesting things to do and subjects to read.

That part feels effortless.

The only thing left to accept is that even at 5:30 in the morning, the park that used to be free and open for a Zone 2 run will not have space for much longer.

Imagine this. If the definition of a good life — by universal norm — is decent health, mastery of some knowledge or skill, freedom from financial constraint (entirely different from reaching a particular net-worth figure), and a preferred social circle around you — then the essential acts of that good life are simple, are they not?

Train the body. Keep the diet simple. Focus proportionately on the career. Optimise financial behaviour. Top it up with the company of people who keep you connected.

What else could there be?

Unfortunately — as simple as they seem — the current capitalist economy, hyper-exposure, and algorithmic culture bombard you with a thousand components all saying the same thing:

You are not enough.

So the simple equation — health, mastery, wealth, relationship — blurs. Or worse: it remains a hidden treasure in the fog of alluring vanity, in all its forms.

If you read Renaissance Flâneur, you will know I have nothing against capitalism. I am an advocate of it. But the question of why it has become so hard to live a simple, great life in the modern world — why it feels like swimming against the tide — is worth investigating. And worth elaborating further, on how one might reach that state without pretending the inevitable natures of this age do not exist.

Back to those words. You are not enough, whispered constantly by the modern world. Here is what it actually looks like.

• You make some money, and not long after, you realise you need more.

• You buy a decent object, and there is already a better one on the way — or waiting further up the value ladder the brand built for exactly this purpose.

• You finally reach a goal you chased for years, and instead of satisfaction, you look around and find somebody already ten steps ahead.

And social media makes it worse.

Because now you are not comparing your life to the people around you. You are comparing your ordinary, not-so-glamorous Tuesday morning to the best moments of several hundred other lives, within ten minutes.

The harsh truth is that this is the nature of consumption, of human beings, and of how capitalism works best: by keeping you slightly dissatisfied. A person who genuinely believes I have enough is incredibly difficult to sell things to. So everywhere you look, there is another message telling you that you were meant to have more than this.

And eventually even the things that were supposed to make life enjoyable become another form of work.

Exercise becomes numbers tracked in Strava. Reading becomes an annual target to post. Travel becomes content, an asset for status comparison. A hobby becomes a side hustle, far from the genuine pursuit of mastery for its own sake.

Suddenly you are optimising your entire existence instead of experiencing it.

Which is why living simply today takes a surprising amount of courage. Because you have to become comfortable with being unimpressive.

Be alright with the older car. With earning enough rather than endlessly chasing more. With saying no to the opportunity that offers status but takes your time. With letting other people misunderstand what you are doing with your life.

Because if you never decide what enough means for you, the modern world will decide it for you.

Which leaves the larger question. What should enough actually look like?

You have heard the term Renaissance Man.

It is an ideology — idealistic, for some. But look past the surface reading of it, the polyglot who plays three instruments, keeps an athletic body, understands markets, and quotes Proust at dinner. Underneath, it is something much plainer.

Learn something. Make something. Understand something. Love someone. Develop your body. Encounter beauty. Explore nature. Read history. Learn an instrument. Understand technology. Have conversations. Build things. Help people. Sit quietly sometimes.

It sounds like plenty, does it not?

But trust me — it is entirely different from climbing the echelon of status or gathering social clout. Which, incidentally, has shifted: no longer cars and salaries, but books read per year, languages learned, countries visited, skills acquired.

This is something else. It is about expanding the territory of your experience.

And the surprising part is what happens when you realise the Renaissance Human is a way of living that explores without needing to possess.

Encounter mathematics without needing to become a mathematician. Paint without needing to become an artist. Study philosophy without needing to become a philosopher. Train the body without needing to make it your identity.

Then you might find that among all of it, there are one or two things at which you are genuinely masterful. Several at which you are competent. And a good number at which — having explored them fully — you remain hilariously mediocre.

And that is life.

Let’s consider these three figures.

Françoise Hardy center was unmistakably music: singer, songwriter, interpreter, an icon with a very particular aesthetic sensibility.

But Hardy also wrote extensively…memoir, fiction, and books dealing with astrology, and also had a serious, long-running interest in astrology. What’s interesting isn’t whether those secondary pursuits matched her musical importance.

They clearly didn’t need to.

She was allowed to be Françoise Hardy the great Parisian musician while simultaneously being Françoise Hardy the person who writes, thinks, reads, and becomes absorbed in strange subjects.

Or consider the legendary guitarist - Brian May.

Sure — he became one of rock’s most recognizable guitarists with Queen, but astronomy wasn’t some celebrity hobby he picked up after becoming wealthy. May studied physics and mathematics and began doctoral research in astrophysics before Queen’s success interrupted it.

Decades later, behind their heyday, he returned to the work and completed his PhD in astrophysics at Imperial College London in 2007. His secondary pursuit became genuinely serious scholarship. Yet he never needed astrophysics to validate his musical identity, nor music to justify his scientific curiosity.

And the last one…probably the testament to the ideology we’re having — David Lynch.

Many of his films (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive), his style of wearing the all-buttoned shirt with a tailored jacket — are iconic…considered one of the most distinctive filmmakers of the era…yet - he originally trained as a painter.

Throughout his life, he painted, drew, made photographs, designed furniture, created music, experimented with sound, made short films and animations, and even became intensely interested in things as mundane as coffee and weather reports.

Some of those pursuits produced significant work. Others didn’t need to.

And that’s the point…of embracing the charm of the Renaissance ‘Human,’ which is a direct synchronization with the ‘know-how’ of embracing simplicity in this age.

A simple life, by definition, is life without decoration. And if the problem is that everything around us gets turned into a vanity affair of optimisation, metrics, and milestones with no end — then the charm of an actual simple life is that it makes ordinary life feel spacious again.

Imagine someone whose life, from the outside, is not especially dramatic.

They work. They have a modest home. They cook. They walk. They see a handful of friends. They are not constantly travelling somewhere exotic. They are not trying to become famous. Their possessions are unremarkable.

Then you actually meet them.

There is a half-finished oil painting on the desk. They are reading something about the fall of Constantinople. They know enough astronomy to point out Saturn. They make one wonderful Roman pasta. They play three songs well on guitar and fifteen others badly. They have been learning French for four years and still make ridiculous mistakes. They understand something about mid-century architecture, because they once became curious about why certain rooms feel beautiful. They can repair a broken sink. They occasionally disappear for an entire afternoon because they discovered some obscure filmmaker from the 1960s and cannot let him go.

Alluring, are they not?

When you are no longer desperately accumulating experiences, you can finally taste the ones you are having.

Someone who requires expensive restaurants, constant travel, new purchases, parties, notifications, and entertainment in order to feel alive has a surprisingly fragile relationship with existence. Remove the stimulation and boredom arrives within the hour.

But give the Renaissance Human a library, a notebook, an instrument, a kitchen, a workshop, a bicycle, a garden, a camera — or simply a city to walk through — and there is already far too much to investigate.

Merge the two ideas, the simple life and the Renaissance Human, and what you get is this: reduce what you need, and increase what you can receive from what you already have.

It replaces the modern question — how impressive can I make my life? — with a far more intimate one.

How deeply can I experience the life I actually have?

You no longer need to escape ordinary existence. You make ordinary existence dense with meaning.

A modest apartment can contain an enormous intellectual world. A quiet weekend can hold music, cooking, reading, conversation, craft, discovery. A person can be materially unremarkable and inwardly inexhaustible.

And suddenly simple life begins to sound elegant.

The word elegance, widely and superficially used, is often reduced to beauty in simplicity. My own definition goes further.

It is selective complexity — richness without unnecessary complication. (I have elaborated on this fully elsewhere.)

And the Renaissance Human is the other half of the same idea: increasing your capacity to appreciate what already surrounds you.

Because today there are more careers to pursue, more places to go, more things to buy, more skills to learn, more information to consume, more people to follow, and more ways to improve yourself than any person could fit into a single lifetime.

So living simply cannot mean escaping all of it and pretending the modern world does not exist.

It has to mean learning how to choose.

And once you stop trying to keep up with everything, you suddenly have room to become curious again. You can be excellent at one thing, good at a few, and happily mediocre at many. None of it has to become a career, a side hustle, a personal brand, or another achievement to display.

Perhaps that is the elegant answer to the problem of modern life. You do not need to experience everything simply because everything is available.

You choose enough. You keep the external life simple enough that the internal one has room to become enormous.

So instead of asking how much you can fit into a life, you begin asking a different question.

How much life can I find in what I have already chosen?

Which is a way of living that, by the daily act of living it alone, is already worth the fulfilment it brings.

And then — glancing out of the left window of my car — I saw a man.

Late middle age. Likely working as a security officer. But probably the coolest one I have ever seen.

A clean, dark navy double-pocket shirt-jacket, close to a British colonial officer model. Matching-fabric pleated trousers with plain hems. Layered over it, a short coat worn open — four pockets, utility cut, perhaps polyester. Chunky black leather boots.

He walked past my window with a cigarette in hand, letting the smoke vanish into the cloudy air.

That sight stayed with me.

Not because smoking under a grey sky is cool by nature. Because of the naturalness, the ease, within the man himself.

None of his gestures, none of his clothes, signalled any attempt at anything. And every piece he wore had a context supporting it. His job as an officer. The wind. The chance of rain — which made a utility short coat the obvious layer rather than a chosen one.

Which made me realise something. This man was not a style icon from Pinterest, or from a curated Instagram feed. And yet he embodied the exact quality I cherish in individuals.

Elegance.

The comparison I cannot get out of my mind is the first moment I landed in Milan back in last February. A car from Malpensa into the city, luggage dropped, and then walking the city for the first time in a black Prada fine worsted-wool jacket, a silk knit tie, calfskin JM Weston tassel loafers.

That was the first time I felt tremendous ease wearing full tailoring. The first time I felt I belonged to the environment around me.

Half a year back in Bangkok now, after that voyage to Lombardy, I had come to believe that tailoring — or any unconventional clothing — has no real place in this city. That the state of elegance is simply not achievable here.

That man, in his utility short coat, walking and smoking and living his life, made me think differently.

Elegant can describe an object. A jacket, a shirt, a cardigan, a dress, a suit — each can be made in an elegant form, on its own terms.

But worn on a body, the craftsmanship and the fabric and the details will not do the whole work. It is the individual who wears the clothes, not the clothes that wear the individual. Which means two further factors come into play:

Person. And context.

When I saw the man in his security-guard ensemble, layered with that four-pocket water-repellent coat, I saw something believable.

Among the concrete walls, the uneven footpaths, the unpredictable monsoon sky, the humid but breezy air — everything he wore was aligned with the environment. He works here. He lives here. He stays here, as part of an ordinary life in a city called Bangkok.

There was no contradiction in the sight — in other words — ‘frictionlessness’.

That is the thing — the alignment between a person’s own nature and the surroundings they move through.

And it is perhaps why a full tailoring ensemble, here in Bangkok, rarely produces the effect it produces in the continental cities.

Which led me to a realisation that seems largely overlooked within the sphere of style discernment, and among people who want to dress better:

The problem is that the style-inspiration images on Pinterest and in Instagram feeds are almost all seen through the lens of the major-city archetypes. New York. Milan. Paris. London. Tokyo. And directly copying the visual cues from a perfectly curated pose taken in one of those cities will rarely give you the same outcome in your own.

The security guard in his short coat. A creative kid in barrel-silhouette jeans with white socks and leather mules. Someone upper-middle-class wearing the Polo Ralph Lauren pony so convincingly that Ralph’s world transcends its continent entirely.

The biggest matter, in my own case, remains this:

That elegance I keep looking for and it is still something to be experimented with.

Refined.

Developed further.

Perhaps for a very long time.

Put it on in a vintage car with soft rain outside, and even a happy relationship somehow resonates with the melancholy of it. Let alone one that has directly suffered from the thing called love.

Lately I have put myself — through direct experience, and through a good deal of introspection and research — into the question of what has actually happened to modern love. Not just dating. The meaning of the word overall.

Because if economic dependence has largely been erased from the list of reasons one must find a partner to provide for them; if there is a subversion of masculine and feminine energy disrupting the traditional roles; and if we now have extreme exposure to romantic possibility through nothing more than scrolling and swiping — then what does the word love actually mean anymore?

Which led me to a friend whose character I respected, and was intrigued by, from our first few encounters.

Pim — Jindaporn Jayangkura — is a content creator working with a discerning lifestyle brand alongside her husband, Arm Korakot Unphanit, who is the reason I met her in the first place. The story of these two caught my attention. They met at a media publishing company, and though they were working for different publications, fate — if I may say it — brought the two writers together.

Before that, Pim wrote for Cleo: a women’s lifestyle publication with a large part of it devoted to relationships between people.

So with all the questions I have accumulated — all the burning curiosity about everything that seems absurd in the realm of love, modernity, and the relationships between people — I believed a conversation with her would reveal something I had overlooked. Or give me a perspective I had not yet considered.

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Patrick:

At this point in your life, what do you think love is?

Pim:

It’s a feeling — a positive feeling we have toward another person. I don’t see love as something that exists only between a man and a woman, or only in romance. Love is almost like matter that can change form and seep into everything. Sometimes you can feel love toward someone you don’t even know, without wanting anything in return.

Romantic love becomes more complicated because passion and other feelings get mixed into it. I’ve never felt a strong need to define it precisely. People understand the feeling in their own way. But we often mix love with other things — with possession — and that’s normal too. It rarely exists in a perfectly isolated form.

Patrick:

Do you believe in the idea of the one — a single person who is your only true life partner?

Pim:

I once read Only Love Is Real by Brian Weiss. The idea, as I remember it, is that a therapist works with two people through past-life regression and discovers that their paths seem to connect across lives. They may not always be lovers; they could have been parent and child, or had some other relationship. It raises the idea that perhaps there is someone we keep meeting.

But personally, I don’t take the idea of one lifelong one very seriously. Maybe some people meet a person and stay with them for their entire life — their first and last love. For me, if there is such a thing, that person might be the one for a particular period of your life. The person who is right for you at twenty might not be the same person who is right for you at thirty.

What matters to me is commitment within that period. I don’t mean having two people at the same time and saying you can’t choose. I mean that for that chapter, you are the one for each other. I don’t need the concept to be bigger than that.

Why make life harder by insisting there must be one perfectly correct person for all time?

Patrick:

Timing feels like one of the most painful factors, because it matters so much and we cannot control it. Many of the women I have seriously liked have already been in a relationship. How do you see the relationship between love and timing?

Pim:

Timing matters in everything, not only relationships. If my husband and I had met five years earlier, we might not have had this kind of relationship. It might not have lasted this long. We might not even have liked each other. Things have their own fit and their own timing. We don’t always need to understand why. Sometimes the answer is simply: right now, it isn’t right.

When you’re young it’s easy to think — it has to be this person, and if not, who will I ever meet? But life is long. You don’t know who you’ll meet later. Maybe one day you’ll meet someone you like even more, and that person will fit the kind of relationship you’ve been waiting for.

I also think most people get stuck in some kind of relationship pattern for a while. In your case, maybe the women you’re drawn to share certain characteristics. Did you know they had partners before you liked them, or did you find out afterward?

There may be some common trait or factor that attracts you. If you can identify and interrupt that pattern, maybe you get out of the loop. I can’t tell you what the pattern is — that might take someone trained to explore it, or you might simply learn your way out of it over time. I had my own loop and eventually came out of it without realising. Again, it came back to seeing how I myself had changed.

Patrick:

I actually tried breaking down my own cases, and even used AI to look for common traits. The pattern it gave me was something like: urban, intellectual yet also socially connected, exposed to many people, broadly attractive, high self-awareness.

And then I thought — if that’s the type I’m drawn to, what are the odds they’ll be single, or overlooked? At my age, many people with those qualities are already in stable relationships. That’s why timing feels so frustrating. It’s outside my control.

Pim: But the timing isn’t right doesn’t mean you surrender. Not everyone you like will always have a partner. Someone might become single later — though by then you might not like them anymore. And you haven’t met everyone in the world.

You also don’t know what another couple’s relationship is really like. Some people look deeply in love from the outside when the relationship has already broken down. These things can’t always be judged by visible rules. A lot of it is emotional, and takes time to understand.

Patrick:

Why do people feel lonely in huge cities like Bangkok, New York, or Tokyo, where they are surrounded by people all the time?

Pim:

I’ll answer this as my own opinion, not as an expert. I don’t think loneliness is automatically dangerous. It happens. It looks especially strange in a busy city because there are people everywhere, so you think you shouldn’t be lonely. If you were alone in rural Scandinavia with a cow, people would think loneliness made sense. In a city, the contrast is more visible.

I think loneliness can even have a healthy side. Society trains us to connect constantly — to connect with the world, share things, go live, meet people, do activities. When we are trained to have connection all the time, we can forget how to be alone. Then the moment we are alone, we think: I’m lonely. Maybe we have forgotten how to spend time with ourselves.

I talk a lot about checking in with yourself, because today’s version of you and tomorrow’s version are already slightly different. In my thirties I became much more aware that I need to keep updating my understanding of myself. What do I think now? How do I feel about this now? I’m not the same person I was at twenty, or even five months ago. We change constantly, and sometimes I surprise myself by discovering I now feel differently about something.

I personally don’t get lonely very often. I need a lot of private time. I can love being with my husband and still be happy when we’re apart, because I get time for myself. Loneliness isn’t necessarily bad if you know how to be lonely — if you can sit with it rather than immediately treating it as an emergency.

Patrick:

For me, working for myself, the downside is that I can go an entire day without seeing anyone. I work, I finish in the evening, the sky gets dark, the room gets quiet — and I suddenly realise I haven’t really talked to or shared anything with anyone all day. A friend of mine works in an office and still experiences the same thing when he comes home. We may have plenty of followers and contacts, but we don’t necessarily call or message them.

Pim:

I experienced something similar when I became a freelancer. I came from the Cleo office, which was incredibly noisy and social. We shouted across the room, gossiped, joked, talked all day. When I started working from home, I missed having female coworkers to talk to. I felt lonely in that sense too.

But I was also an only child, and had always liked being alone in my room, in my own corner. So I gradually adjusted. Maybe having Arm, someone I can talk to about anything, helps. But I still think this kind of loneliness is normal. You feel lonely because you haven’t connected with anyone.

If the loneliness truly felt unbearable, maybe you would build a community, or join something. But sometimes we feel lonely and still remain with it, because we don’t actually want just any substitute. We may already have a specific picture in our heads — perhaps we think the only cure is a partner, not simply joining an activity.

I’ve tried joining clubs and it never really worked for me. I’m probably introverted, although I’m not someone who refuses to talk to people. I just don’t usually start. Being in organised social groups can feel psychologically exhausting. Even a book club sounds terrible to me: I like reading, but I don’t want to finish a book and then sit in a circle analysing it. I read it, I finish it, I move on. That taught me something about myself.

So maybe you sometimes enjoy part of your loneliness without realising it. You can be lonely without it destroying you. And everyone relieves it differently. For one person, chatting is enough. Another needs to meet face to face. Someone else may actually like the lonely feeling. There isn’t one method for everyone.

Patrick:

There’s a line in Green Book: “The world’s full of lonely people afraid to make the first move.” What do you think people are afraid of? Two lonely people might be sitting near each other, both wanting connection, and neither approaches.

Pim:

Maybe rejection. You might think — what if the other person doesn’t want to talk to me? Then you decide you shouldn’t bother them. But I also think it can simply become a habit. If you’ve been alone for a long time, you get used to not approaching people.

An extrovert can walk into a place, talk to people, make friends easily. An introvert often thinks through everything: What should I say? Is this topic okay? Can I share something personal yet?

Sometimes loneliness isn’t strong enough to beat anxiety, or the comfort of the safe zone. Loneliness itself can become a safe zone. You’re lonely, yes — but staying quiet feels safer than talking to someone and not knowing what will happen.

Patrick:

What should a single person do then, if timing is important and largely uncontrollable? Do you believe in actively searching for love, or in living your life well and letting it arrive when it arrives?

Pim:

I strongly believe in living your life. I say that because I spent so much of my own life chasing love. Then one day I stopped needing to chase it — not because I decided I never wanted love again, but because I realised I had other things to do. And that was around the time things changed.

But stopping the chase doesn’t mean love appears immediately. It has its own timing.

I believe that when you live your life instead of constantly hunting, you eventually meet what is genuinely yours. If you are always searching desperately, you may grab something that isn’t actually right for you. But I understand why not everyone can relax about it. A single friend can still ask every day: why am I still single? And I can’t answer that. Nobody can give a simple answer.

Patrick:

When you say chasing can feel like struggling too hard — does that include dating apps? Is being on one a form of desperation?

Pim:

No. I think whichever route you take, you’ll meet someone when you are meant to meet them.

Imagine two routes reaching the same destination at the same time. On one, you run the whole way and arrive exhausted. On the other, you sit in a car and do something else along the way. The destination might be the same, but your internal experience is completely different.

That’s the difference I care about. One person can be single and think: I’m okay, I can be alone, I even like being single. Another can think: I hate being single, am I the only single person left, is something wrong with me, am I strange? The behaviour can look similar. The feeling inside is different.

Dating apps are just tools. Instagram can function like a dating app too. Using one doesn’t automatically look desperate to me. Trying too hard is about your emotional state, not the behaviour itself.

Patrick:

I use the word elegant a lot. Is there such a thing as navigating love elegantly? What would it mean to approach it with grace?

Pim:

For me, searching for love elegantly isn’t about refusing to chase, or following some perfect rule. Whether you search actively, don’t search, or struggle a little — the most elegant thing is to be yourself.

Be yourself is difficult to define, but I think authenticity in love is the most graceful approach, because it means you value yourself.

Don’t try to become the person you think someone else will like. That is ultimately less important than whether you like yourself. Whether or not you have a partner, you are the person you have to live with for your whole life. If I had to live as someone I disliked, just because another person liked that version of me, I couldn’t accept it.

You are also the person who looks back at your own life. Other people aren’t sitting around thinking about what Patrick was like last year — but you may think about who you were yesterday, or ten years ago.

So showing your real self is one of the best things you can give yourself.

Every time I have a conversation with Pim, it provides a novel perspective while holding a similar tone. A little contrast. A worldview that contradicts my own, but stays open enough to provoke thought rather than close it down.

For this conversation — the longest we have had — it took a few days of reflection before a name arrived.

Archibald Alec Leach. Or, as you know him, Cary Grant.

The man from Bristol, whose whole life can be read as an act of becoming someone else. He changed his name. He tweaked his accent and his speech patterns. He engineered his body language. He described pretending to be the man he wanted to be until, as he put it, “he became me.” And he became one of the icons of elegance of the twentieth century.

At first, Pim’s conclusion on navigating love elegantly — to ‘be yourself’ — seems to contradict the entire existence of that man.

But consider that in his fifties, Grant spent years in psychiatric therapy — including roughly a hundred supervised LSD sessions — trying to find himself. And that in the realm of love, it took four divorces before he settled, finally, with Barbara Harris: the woman who stayed with him until the last moment.

The construction worked completely in every room but one.

So if you ask me what I now think about modern love — among all the contemporary conditions that have shifted so much in the last decade — the practical answer, while not romantic to hear, is this.

Accept what you can control, and what you cannot.

And embrace the feeling anyway. Whether it is love, passion, attraction, or whatever else gravitates you toward another human being.

For more of Pim’s work, and a worldview that extends well beyond relationships — she writes La Garçonne Diary, named for a French term once used of women who stepped outside the conventional. It is where she records what she notices in ordinary life.

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For me, it’s a conversational place, a space that serves drinks (ideally crafted ones; either cocktails, niche wine, or some IPA beer rarely found in department stores). To tender the heart and soul of visitors, whether they come in a group, as a couple, or alone. But it’s always a place for connection (or hopefully so).

Now, I would like you to imagine the scene of a Wednesday evening, past 9 o’clock, and what I saw was a different kind of people than I normally saw at the bar called ‘Mutual Bar’—by regular standards, it’s a cocktail and after-work hangout place for white-collar workers in the CBD area; but this time, it was quieter and contained an ‘intentive aura’ that went beyond drinking and talking endlessly about life.

A ‘Lecture Bar’ is a trend that came out of nowhere but surprised me plenty. The idea of turning bar into cultural symposiums, lectures, or discussions from artists, influencers, and KOLs from different industries and sectors, from finance, sociology, and psychology to pop culture.

The first time I heard about it 3 months ago, to be honest, I was skeptical. I thought it was just a trend, a ‘counterculture’ to previous decades of hedonism, just like the mass adoption of “Longevity” buzzwords, where everyone in Bangkok seems to wake up at 6 am and go to Benjakitti Park with a ‘run club’…and perhaps I still might be right, since it has been less than a year since dozens of ‘Lecture Bars’ across the city have occurred. Only time will tell, but the more interesting thing I’ve come up with is that—whether it’s a trend or not—it’s proof that ‘meaningful conversation between humans’ is still a concern among the public and still matters—and it ‘can be done’ alongside alcohol.

This made me think of the visual image I always romanticize—the idea of intellectual salons back in the Belle Époque in Paris during the late 19th century or ‘cafe society’ in Manhattan during the early 20th century. A gathering of artists, writers, socialites, or just social climbers; both sides of interesting thinkers and, on the other, ‘clout chasers’; yet it doesn’t deny the image of well-dressed people, well-curated venues, and well-thought-out conversations. Vanity or not—it’s an experience that feels sophisticated to be in.

Back to the ‘Lecture Bar’ of 2026—that happens in Bangkok (and perhaps other major cities around the world), the reason why it relates to urban people is perhaps the erasure of ‘tradition, excessive formality, and rigidity’ from it. No dress code, no salonnière, no exclusivity based on status. Only a ticket price, a price for a drink, and that’s it…entering the ‘well-cultured’ space of modern days.

Sure, there’s certainly one who just went there for ‘content’, as I witnessed the act of taking a photo or short video of the guest and moderator on stage for an IG story, and after that, ‘got hooked’ by endless scrolling instead of what was really happening on the stage; but most people actually sat, listened, and engaged (since the discussion itself was far from a business seminar or something hyper-intellectual that sprays quotes from Schopenhauer or Descartes).

Another aspect that has shifted in context and shown itself to me is ‘how people here treat alcohol differently’.

In Europe, the idea of having a bottle of wine and a 3-hour-long conversation is certainly not a new thing. Aperitivo is an ingrained culture that unconsciously blends into the everyday lives of natives who were born and live there. However, back in the last decade, the perception of alcohol in Bangkok was far from that ‘slow burn’ but rather an intense hedonism of escapism.

Now, with this thing happening, an after-work drink, a group of people in a single space, gathering for an idea, a conversation, a connection between other humans—is another proof that drinking alcohol is not entirely bad here anymore. It serves as a companion for the night that makes dialogue smoother, ideas flow more freely—with the ‘optimal amount taken, of course’.

Hope might be the word I’d have for this trend.

Even if it’s a temporary hype for some to attend and post on IG to accumulate social capital, it doesn’t matter. It’s evidence that there’s a demand for meaningful conversation between humans. Moreover, with depth, with critical thinking…these are virtues that never fade away.

By the end of the night, after a glass of Negroni and Gin Rickey, and over an unexpected connection with another individual, I could reassure myself that night that my idea of creating my own ‘salon’ might not be a daydream anymore.

Big cities always carry a distinct narrative that serves both romance and melancholy at once. Considering that I walk past hundreds of people daily — thousands on some days — why is the idea of isolation, of loneliness, of whatever word we use to describe the disconnection between one another, still so profound?

Especially on the matter of romantic relationships.

When it comes to love, I am far from the best person to speak intelligently about it. I do not even know what that would mean. But something that happened three days ago might have brought me closer to the layers of meaning behind the term.

A rainy Thursday evening in Bangkok. Traffic jammed, as ever. A street called Song Wat — which is really a thing here right now, for tourists and locals both: the old-world neighbourhood, the cultural heritage, and the recent pop of cafés, restaurants, and creative spaces. A new area to explore.

The occasion was the grand opening of a new brand by a well-known friend, who had invited me.

It was fascinating. Very unusual, and distinct from the events I am familiar with — most of mine are menswear, design, classic-culture circles. To be exposed to a contemporary, more fashion-forward scene was a genuine shift.

I still kept my own register, of course. My obsession with tailoring, in the form of a Polo Ralph Lauren double-breasted blazer as a layering piece — though this time over a white T-shirt and white jeans, with Cuban-heel boots instead of the conventional preppy lookbook.

There were many interesting people there. People I would rarely have the context to speak with. I met plenty.

But no one compared to a young woman — very bright, very attentive — who walked the length of the store with her iPad. Clearly working the event in some capacity.

I saw her sit down for the first time in the inner part of the store, and had the chance to open with:

“Love your style. Very working-woman vibe.”

She laughed.

Teased me about the line for a while. And the rest of that half hour was a continuous exchange of respect, of ease, of stories from both sides.

Then reality arrived, in the form of a glance at my watch and the knowledge that I had to get back to editing a film.

As you may guess — it felt too bad to end the encounter like that. So I asked for her Instagram. Followed her. She followed back. Everything perfect on paper.

Until that night, after the work was done, when I found out that she was already with someone.

And once again, the city gave me its usual response:

This is more times than I can count now. A very strong connection at the first encounter, in real life — and a reality harsh enough that it could not care less how perfect the moment was.

Which is understandable. Timing rarely arranges itself for anyone’s convenience, and the people worth wanting are, almost by definition, already wanted.

That is the reality of it in 2026, I suppose.

What happened three days ago is one good example.

And what did I do afterwards?

I returned to the medium called cinema. Considering that cinema is a way of understanding the worldview someone else holds on the same subject — the writer’s, the director’s — and how they want you to experience it.

But this time it was not the nostalgic fantasy of old Hollywood. Nor an existential piece from a European auteur of the 1960s.

Something contemporary. And surprisingly, the messages there made me accept the harsh truth of it better than any of the old canon would have.

First, the film Roger Ebert described as “sweet, funny, and observant” — Swingers (1996). Which reminded me that all the gloom comes from the inside. That it comes from your own mind, and does not necessarily mean you are what your mind says you are.

Then Past Lives (2023), which I consider very faithful to Celine Song. And which arrived with a simpler and heavier idea: “Timing is crucial to a relationship. And it is unbearable that you cannot control it.”

Watching both, in a single day, after finding out the unpleasant reality — it gave me a kind of clarity.

Not in a hopeful romantic way. Not in a pessimistic one either.

Just a reminder of the reality of life, and of the nature of a big city. That it is normal to be hit by the timing factor. That it hurts a little when you find a rare individual you want to know more about, and find them unavailable, and have to shut off any further interaction.

And that it is also fine to feel it. And to continue doing it anyway.

Because that is part of being human, is it not?

The evidence that one still has the thing called a heart. And the feelings that come with it.

And it has begun to consume me again.

My relationship with this city is ‘a place that bombards me with social-class comparison, status anxiety, the materialist game.’ And no matter how much I want to break free by sprinting to the top — so that those factors affect me no longer — it feels like swimming in a closed pond. Domestically capped. No hope of breaking through. No way of becoming the person I want to be from inside it.

The lens the city forces me to adopt is that of a player in a never-ending game that was somewhat rigged from the start.

However, earlier this year, between January and March — the late winter of Europe — I was in Milan. I visited Vienna. A day trip to Rimini. Portofino. And my mind, somehow, operated differently. I began to see the world, and to hold a different relationship with the environment around me, in a way I never had before.

I still remember the first moment I dropped my luggage at an apartment on Via Pasquale Sottocorno. Putting on my black tailored Prada jacket, a cashmere Renoma scarf, a camel overcoat — and walking into the heart of the city, through San Babila to Via Montenapoleone.

The more I walked that same route, week by week, the more something shifted. By the time I flew back to Bangkok in March, I was able to see this metropolis differently for the first time.

Suddenly the walk along Bangkok affluent area like Langsuan Road or Central Embassy — a place that contained every archetype I used to feel inferior to — no longer produced that feeling.

I began to see clearly the concrete objectivity behind status anxiety. To see through the illusion of luxury and consumption, which suddenly seemed insignificant in magnitude compared to Montenapoleone.

The entire six weeks in the heart of Lombardy—even in a role far removed from the typical “local habitat”—was far from the experience of a typical tourist or a fleeting visitor, content to soak up the romance, indulge in the finer things, and leave without ever seeing the place’s raw nature.

It was a period of cultural immersion, experienced through the eyes of an observer at its finest.

Then almost half a year passed.

And with my mind, my body, and my spirit placed back inside the very same apartment, the same destinations, the same tempo of life I have known for over two decades — the very same programming has installed itself into me again.

The same old perspective. Player rather than observer.

That is what is currently inside me.

Which leads to this dispatch. On how a city — I may argue — dictates one’s life trajectory more than any other factor ever will.

And if you are able to fully accept that, and then do something about it, a pathway toward a great life may be closer than it was before.

“The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.” — Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903)

We often talk as if the human mind exists independently of its surroundings — as though personality, motivation, and identity were properties we simply carry around inside our heads.

Modern psychology and neuroscience paint a different picture.

These cues shape what our attention notices. Which emotions become easier to access. Which memories are activated. And which version of ourselves becomes most available.

Over time, the brain learns what a particular environment demands — and becomes increasingly efficient at producing the mindset that helped us navigate it before.

This is why returning to a childhood home can evoke emotions you have not felt in years. Why people slip back into old family roles during the holidays. And why moving to a new city can feel like becoming a different person.

Cities are powerful because they are not neutral collections of buildings. They are dense ecosystems of repeated psychological signals.

Every city rewards certain behaviours, values, and identities more than others. New York implicitly rewards relentless ambition, networking, competition, visible success. Florence rewards craftsmanship, public life, leisure, artistic expression, community.

And because humans are profoundly social creatures, our brains continuously compare us with the people around us — to determine whether we belong, whether we are succeeding, and what goals we ought to pursue.

This process is largely automatic. You do not wake up deciding to compare yourself. Your brain does it because, throughout human evolution, understanding your position within a group was closely tied to survival.

The modern city amplifies this ancient mechanism by surrounding us with constant, highly visible signals of wealth, beauty, status, and success.

At the same time, the brain relies heavily on context-dependent learning. Experiences are not stored as isolated facts, but as networks linked to places, routines, people, and sensory cues.

Walking the same streets, hearing the same language, entering the same neighbourhood — any of these can reactivate patterns of thinking that developed there years earlier.

This is why someone who has overcome an insecurity may suddenly feel like their younger self after returning to a familiar environment. It is not that they have forgotten their growth. It is that the environment has activated an older network of memories, expectations, and emotional responses.

Which is precisely my own case. The post-Milan observer identity, replaced by the player identity — wired back into my psyche like a pre-Milan version of myself.

This is why changing environments so often feels psychologically transformative. The change is not magic. Nor is it merely novelty. It is the result of interrupting deeply learned associations, and exposing the mind to a different set of daily reinforcements.

When the surrounding culture, pace, architecture, and social expectations align closely with a person’s values, the brain gradually invests more energy in those values — because they are continually rewarded.

But when an environment repeatedly reinforces ways of thinking that conflict with a person’s aspirations, maintaining an alternative mindset requires constant conscious effort. And over months and years, that effort becomes exhausting.

In many ways, choosing where to live is choosing the ecosystem that will most consistently shape the person you are becoming—a truth that popular culture often captures in its purest form.

I. La La Land (2016) — the city that legitimises your dream

Los Angeles, in this film, is often read as merely the setting. Psychologically, it is an identity amplifier.

Damien Chazelle’s picture — auteur cinema that went mass successfully, in both commercial and artistic terms — tells the story of dreamers. One of them is Mia (Emma Stone): an aspiring actress who spends years in Los Angeles working as a barista, following her dream relentlessly.

If you have seen the film, you know Mia does become an actress. But not because Los Angeles magically grants talent.

She becomes someone who continues to pursue acting, because everything around her says: people like you exist here.

The auditions. The theatres. The conversations. The failures. The successes.

The city normalises the dream.

Had she remained in Boulder City, Nevada — where acting was viewed as unrealistic — her identity would have had to defend itself constantly. Los Angeles reduces that friction.

II. The Devil Wears Prada (2006) — the city rewrites your standards

Set in the high-fashion scene of New York, in publishing’s early digital era of the 2000s, the film stands for a melancholic romance and harsh beauty of working life that now survives only as nostalgia.

Andrea (Anne Hathaway) arrives knowing nothing about fashion, and caring less. Then she is wired by New York’s elite ecosystem.

At first, everyone around her seems superficial. Then something fascinating happens.

Without consciously deciding to change, she begins dressing differently. Speaking differently. Prioritising differently. Noticing details she previously ignored. Valuing success differently.

No one sits her down and brainwashes her. Miranda Priestly is a catalyst, not a cause.

The environment does the work.

Though in the end it costs her a relationship — and the thrift-shop eye she came in with. She can no longer see style the way she once did.

III. Midnight in Paris (2011) — the city changes how reality is experienced

Probably Woody Allen’s most successful piece of the new millennium, and one I surrendered to entirely — the nostalgic ideology, the romanticisation. Gil (Owen Wilson) is a creative who longs for the beauty of a bygone era, and Paris lets him feel it again. With or without the time travel.

The city slows him down.

He walks. He notices architecture. Books. Conversations. Art. His attention shifts from career anxiety toward aesthetic appreciation.

The city does not merely give him new experiences. It changes what his mind pays attention to.

But the important lesson of the film is its ending.

Gil realises that every era romanticises another era. The insight is not that Paris is objectively perfect. It is that perception is always shaped by context — and that idealising another place, or another time, can itself become a trap if you stop examining it.

Across all three stories, the city is not a backdrop. It is an invisible character, shaping the protagonist’s identity.

Every city carries its own values, incentives, and social signals. Over months and years, those signals quietly become part of how we think.

In that sense, choosing where to live is like choosing the psychological ecosystem that will most consistently reinforce the person you’re becoming.

And even if the universe has destined you to be far from it, I believe it’s still a worthwhile pursuit—perhaps even a duty to your own soul—to find your way to the places your mind longs for.

The idea of the life lottery — as ridiculous as it sounds — is a reality that dictates many trajectories, from the first breath to the last. Socioeconomics. Network. City. Country. All of them affect your life at some point.

Consider a life born into a middle class in a strong-currency country, with high wages and a high quality of life. That person has more freedom to travel, to eat, to sleep, than someone born into a middle class in a weak-currency country with underdeveloped domestic infrastructure. The happiness and the opportunity that each life has to offer are simply not equal by nature.

Equality, as romantic as it sounds, is an ideal state that is difficult to reach.

And yet — “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Those words from the French philosopher stand for a wisdom I hold onto. Having read both his breakthrough fiction, L’Étranger, and his philosophical statement in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, what I take from them is this:

No matter where you were born — if the situation is not what you desire, even by the universe’s random judgement in placing you there — you can always do something about it.

The 2026 world has made this more possible than ever.

Not entirely easy, I admit.

But achievable.

The fact that you, reading this now — we have never met, and are likely separated by thousands of miles — are connected to me through this piece, is itself the evidence. The internet has made geography matter less.

(It still plays a part. Especially in the uglier truth of perception bias around race and ethnicity. But I will leave that here, since delving into it properly would take an entire editorial of its own.)

What I mean is that an individual can now connect globally, and contribute value within the system, in a way that was not previously available. Work that can be done across continents. Conversations that ignite across time zones. Worldviews and perspectives cultivated with fewer gatekeepers — as anyone watching what is currently happening on Substack can see.

So: to work, to explore, to meet new people, and to make a move toward the city that resonates more closely with your own frequency — this has never been easier.

It does not need to be a permanent move.

But if your current environment has begun to consume your soul and numb your perspective — and if you are already aware that it has — then a month or two in an entirely new city, a new continent, a new culture, may be the essential thing. The interruption that breaks you out of the unconscious feedback loop the current place has been running on you.

The definition of a great life varies with how one defines the term. Here at Renaissance Flâneur, it is the purposeful mode of living: the deliberate life, held on one’s own terms, with self-awareness and elegance in moving through time.

The city, as we have covered, plays an enormous role in this.

And in my case — if you were wondering — the time for another European voyage is coming.

I teased this earlier, in the section on Midnight in Paris. There is a reason I wrote that I resonated with, and surrendered to, the nostalgic ideology and romanticisation of the protagonist.

My last time there was only a week. But the emotional appeal of walking along the Seine at midnight during a rainstorm, under an umbrella bought that afternoon, remains ingrained in my memory and in my senses.

It is an eternally romantic city for me. And with some local insight now gathered, I hope to explore the beauty of it, the harsh reality of it, and the actual life of Paris — what the city really is, rather than what it is imagined to be.

Perhaps the coming late-autumn voyage will be another reminder of the city that synchronises with mine.

And perhaps it will take the too-involved player mind out of me once again — and allow me to return, and see Bangkok, this love-and-hate tropical metropolis, as an observer.

Perhaps it is the fact that the spot sits on the 56th floor, among the thirty tallest buildings in town — offering the full, wide landscape of Bangkok, especially at dusk. You see the LED lights everywhere. From the vibrance of Ratchaprasong, full of traffic jams and malls, to the end of the horizon that vividly gives you the feeling of the city that never sleeps.

Cocktails are probably the other thing that brings me back again and again. As a bar recognised by Tatler, the classics I love — Americano, Negroni, Martini, Whisky Highball — have never disappointed me.

Though lately, since every concierge, waitress, and bartender remembers my face and the dinner attire I wear for the place, I have taken to asking the bartenders to make something unique, something that fits my mood. My last drink was a Bangkok Sling. Normally it would be the Singapore Sling, which uses pineapple juice. This one used guava, with a spiced garnish, to make it Bangkok in his own interpretation.

That is the charm of cocktails, I suppose. The art of making a drink to tend someone’s soul, in whatever mood they arrive in.

But the true highlight — the reason I am addicted to this place, and to many great cocktail bars across Bangkok — is the ambiguity of it.

The experiences vary.

From witnessing a shouting match that almost turned into a fistfight, at the very level of five-star hotel prestige. To the economist who also adored Martinis and James Bond, and ended up in conversation with me until midnight. To the elegant lady in a black dress who walked over and asked me to take a photograph of her, and who later became a companion hard to forget — an orchestra performance one night, an afternoon museum walk another.

Which has led me to a realisation.

A big city. Especially Bangkok, where lights, neon, and the sound of automobiles and motorcycles run at all hours. Even with millions of lives living in the very same city, to find someone to simply sit down with — to have an inspiring conversation, to connect at a substantial level beyond a shallow exchange on social media — is rare.

And putting myself alone at the bar allows me to deal with it.

Not perfectly, for sure. Some nights, it gets even emptier than before.

But many times it has given me unforgettable evenings. And a small hope that real-life connection — without mutual followers, without the algorithm’s introduction — is still possible. Even if it becomes harder and harder to find.

So: the evening, in modern evening attire.

Think of a midnight-blue worsted wool dinner jacket with a satin shawl lapel — the kind Cary Grant wore in To Catch a Thief, or Sean Connery in Dr. No. But forgo the bow tie. Forgo the galon-striped trousers. Keep only the jacket, as a reminder of the ritual, of the sophistication of wearing one to a place that still deserves it.

Even if no one else is wearing it anymore.

And then the place itself. The 56th floor, carrying that prestigious Manhattan name. The gold shimmer of the Art Deco interior.

I think it is a charm that nothing else replaces. Especially if you go alone — and see what the universe might hand you.

Something, or someone, to observe. Or to engage with.

“I used to wonder what kind of an armchair costs $2,500. Now I understand.”

That was a quote from my friend, who invited me to the showcase of vintage furniture and objects called Open (House) Vol. 1, presented by the curator and manufacturer Archives Design.

While my eyes and mind were far from functioning at 100% — since I had to direct a campaign at the airport at 4 a.m., and had not gotten any sleep — by the time I arrived at the showroom at 11 a.m., my brain was in less than an ideal state.

However, every piece there energised and fascinated me, just like when a boy sees an exotic car, or a girl sees a beautiful dress.

The highlight was certainly the Chandigarh works by Pierre Jeanneret — which have recently ridden a wave of hype among Bangkok’s upper-class, design-conscious crowd. Though, for me, they do not quite speak to my own taste.

The others were from iconic names that any design-oriented person would recognise — Isamu Noguchi, Poul Henningsen, Le Corbusier. And I would say the prices of those pieces are very tempting. High enough to make them worthwhile as collectible vintage pieces, but not so overhyped or inflated as to become questionable. Of course, Pierre Jeanneret remains the exception. I still think the prices are relatively high compared to decades ago.

(Though it seems that almost every piece by the Frenchman has already been sold, based on what my friend told me.)

Then I finally asked her the thing I had been tempted to ask her — or anyone in this sector — for a very long time.

The context is that there is an ongoing debate, both online and in real life, that I have encountered from two sides.

One side says that anyone who does not buy a vintage or officially licensed piece — like an Eames Lounge Chair from Herman Miller, or Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair from Knoll — is “just a pretentious broke person violating the designer’s copyright.”

The other side says:

“One of the core ideas behind furniture — or any well-designed object — from Eames, Wegner, and many other twentieth-century designers, was to make good design accessible to more people. Not just to a privileged few.”

“And a replica, if it is well-crafted and true to the original designer’s intentions, can be a direct homage to the core philosophy of mid-century design.”

The answer my friend gave me… I promised to keep between us.

But if I have to share my own take, it would be this:

I like to think of it from the perspective of reproduction clothing in the workwear and vintage denim market.

Think of the Levi’s 501 during the golden era of denim in the 1960s. It inspired many purist Japanese denim makers to craft their own jeans as a tribute — recreating the authentic silhouette and details of Levi’s from that era. Something that Levi’s itself can no longer do. Or simply chooses not to.

But the difference between the reproduction of vintage clothing and the replica of iconic furniture probably lies in one harsh truth:

You can still buy a brand-new piece from the exact licensed manufacturer.

So by choosing not to do so, you are clearly not staying true to the commercial rights of the original design.

That remains an argument that cannot be denied.

In the end, I do not think I have the right to judge someone for buying a replica of an LC4 Chaise Longue. They might genuinely admire the purist expression of modernism made famous by Le Corbusier — yet they are in their early twenties, living in a developing country, and do not come from a wealthy family with money to spare.

I do not own any replica pieces myself. Not yet.

Just like with clothing, when it comes to furniture of such iconic status, I would rather buy pre-owned. Though in cases like the Chandigarh series by Pierre Jeanneret — where there is no longer an official manufacturer, and the vintage market has pushed prices so high — ownership is reserved for only those who earn handsomely.

Imagine a group from the effortless mid-century jet set.

Having a simple lunch — one that is not so simple when you consider the wine, the food spread across the table. Seeing their style. Their gesture. Beyond the leisurely activities and the aesthetic — which you can absorb through the photographs of Slim Aarons, and which may seem a little extravagant, even hedonistic at points — here lies the undeniable virtue: Effortless charm.

As Aarons himself stated, his philosophy was to photograph:

“Attractive people, Doing Attractive Things, in Attractive Places.”

So — what makes the people in Aarons’s images seem so attractive with the least apparent effort possible?

When you consider the idea of attractiveness in the current day, most of what you can see revolves around money and physical attractiveness. Sure — they are concrete assets that certainly elevate one’s status within the social echelon.

But here is the issue.

There are plenty of well-fit, well-groomed men — wearing shirts from Zegna, trousers from Loewe, with an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak on their wrist and perhaps Loro Piana Summer Walks on their feet — but who lack the charm and the aura of attractiveness that the old-world leisure class of the twentieth century possessed.

And, ladies and gentlemen, my intention here is far from romanticising the elite and privileged lifestyle of the few who lived as if superior to others.

No — far from it.

What matters is the larger question:

What really makes someone so attractive in the effortless manner?

If money, luxury objects, and physical optimisation for the algorithmic era are not the answer — and if the answer somehow lies within the aristocrats and socialites Aarons captured — then there must be something beyond the superficial asset.

Something that perhaps lies in the older idea of character cultivation — and in the inner qualities that money alone cannot afford to acquire.

Something has shifted in what our culture rewards.

Everything must now be evaluated according to usefulness, efficiency, optimization, and measurable outcomes. The highest virtues of the current moment are productivity, scalability, innovation, disruption, and growth. Time is treated as a resource to be optimized.

• Relationships become networks.

• Knowledge becomes content.

• Attention becomes currency.

Even the self becomes a project — to be improved through better habits, better data, better routines, better performance metrics.

Success is measured less by what one preserves than by what one builds, scales, or disrupts.

This is the utilitarian ethos. It shapes not only the tech billionaires beyond Silicon Valley — it now shapes every knowledge worker, every metropolitan professional, across the globe.

And here is the consequence:

But it was not always this way.

Consider Europe around the year 1700.

There were no multinational corporations. No stock exchanges. No modern infrastructure — no railways, no electricity, no industrial capitalism as we now understand it.

The urban class that emerged over the following two centuries — the merchants, bankers, industrialists, engineers, lawyers, and entrepreneurs — literally built the modern world. They built banks, railways, factories, ports, insurance companies. They built universities, newspapers, museums, and entire cities.

They were, in the most literal sense, the builders of civilization.

Now here is the part that matters for our discussion.

The first generation of these builders was often ruthless. A merchant, a factory owner, a banker, a railway investor, an industrial entrepreneur. That person built the fortune through what we would today call aggressive utilitarian behaviour.

Then the second generation received a better education. Moved into a more prestigious neighbourhood. Bought art. Purchased a country estate. Developed political connections.

The third generation grew up surrounded by servants, cultural refinement, private institutions, and influential family friends.

By the fourth or fifth generation, the original commercial struggle had disappeared from family memory. What began as raw ambition now felt ancient. The family no longer appeared entrepreneurial in any energetic sense.

It appeared…

Established.

Effortless.

Socially secure.

This is often what people today call old money. And here is the paradox worth noticing:

While the term now presents itself as the opposite of the utilitarian mentality — preferring understatement to display, leisure to visible ambition, inherited taste to commercial excitement, social confidence to self-promotion — much of what we call old money was originally created by exactly the kind of aggressive ambition it later learned to hide.

The ancestor made the fortune by being economically disruptive.

The descendants preserved the fortune by appearing socially timeless.

What matters here is the transformation itself.

Over time, these families transformed commercial success into cultural legitimacy. They bought country houses. Collected art. Funded libraries. Established universities. Entered politics. Sponsored orchestras. And gradually shifted from builders of wealth to guardians of culture.

They stopped behaving like ambitious entrepreneurs and started behaving like custodians of civilisation.

Their descendants inherited not only money, but confidence, cultural habits, and the assumption that they belonged in elite circles.

That is the quiet ease we recognise in the photographs of Slim Aarons.

Now — the reason this history matters is not because the current wealth-creating class should aspire to become the next old money.

That is not the argument.

The argument is this:

Today’s world is faster, more fluid, and centred on information rather than infrastructure. Success is measured through innovation, disruption, scaling, and rapid adaptation — instead of through permanence, continuity, or the slow work of becoming a certain kind of person.

Even after becoming immensely successful, many of today’s high achievers continue to define themselves through work, innovation, and the next breakthrough. Their identity remains tied to building, disrupting, solving problems, and constantly moving forward.

The company matters more than the estate. The product roadmap more than the family library. The next investment more than the inherited tradition.

This is not a moral failing on their part. It is the ethos of the age. But it does explain why cultivated character is now so rare — and why, when we encounter it, it feels almost anachronistic.

Yet the cultivation of those older virtues — literature, cinema, art, architecture, design, and the ideology of elegance in life — are, in my opinion, the very things that made the people in Slim Aarons’s images so attractive in the first place.

Not the generational money.

Not the objects or the places.

But the inner characters that had been accumulated and cultivated inside them — until it appeared as their nature.

And in this age — where everything has turned into optimisation for metrics, productivity for productivity’s sake, and speed above all else…

Those characters of an old-world individual have never been more needed.

And, perhaps, never more quietly rewarded.

“Knowledge is capable of being its own end.” — John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Discourse V, 1852

In a world where almost everyone is chasing the same metrics, the people who stand out are often those who are not governed by them.

Someone with genuine taste filters out noise instead of following every trend.

Someone with a coherent worldview remains steady while public opinion constantly shifts.

Someone with inner character does not need to perform confidence — because confidence has become part of who they are.

Such people possess something increasingly rare: an internal centre of gravity. They are not constantly pulled by the demands of algorithms, markets, or social approval.

This is why the qualities we associate with the old-world individual — cultivation, restraint, elegance, curiosity, composure, intellectual breadth, quiet confidence — feel surprisingly modern despite their age.

They are no longer common. And scarcity creates value.

In an economy that rewards speed, the person capable of deep attention becomes exceptional.

In a culture that rewards visibility, the person who does not seek attention often commands it.

In a society that measures almost everything, the most important human qualities remain the ones that resist measurement.

The future may belong to technology. But distinction will increasingly belong to those who remember what technology cannot replace. Competence will always matter — but as competence becomes more widely available through software and artificial intelligence, character, taste, judgment, and wisdom become the stronger differentiators.

Given all of this — given what the contemporary world has forgotten about what makes a life interesting, beyond mere consumption and status accumulation, beyond digits on a financial portfolio or hours logged into Slack — I would like to offer a case study.

A case study of how a cultivated character can turn one individual into a figure of distinctive presence — with elegance, ease, and effortless charm.

This might be an extreme case — but it is worth revisiting this gentleman of Hollywood: Cary Grant. (I have dedicated a full piece to this man’s remarkable life — here.)

Imagine being born as an insecure, poor child with abandonment issues in early-1900s Britain — then, two decades later, landing in New York City. The Land of Opportunity, at least at that time.

That is the beginning of Archibald Leach.

With his unique ability — not in acting, but in becoming, through sheer relentless aspiration for a better identity — he studied the people of high society he met along the way.

From Douglas Fairbanks Sr., whom he first met during a transatlantic cruise to the United States, to observing the gentlemen of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan — how they talked, how they walked, how they spoke, how they dressed.

Throughout the 1920s, Archibald Leach learned everything. He read the great books. He filled himself with the character of the cultivated class — a character that was usually passed along through generations of families he had not been born into.

So when Hollywood discovered him — and as the studios loved to do in that period, by changing his name into something more sophisticated — Cary Grant was born.

And from that moment on, the world had one of its greatest icons. Of the gentleman. Of the actor. Of the individual figure who proved how much greatness one can achieve.

What amazes me, when I look back at his early type-casting, is that he was usually cast as an Anglo-upper-class character on film.

Which is no wonder, considering he was able to navigate Hollywood parties, date socialites, and perform — both on screen and off — so effortlessly.

The man had just spent a whole decade cultivating the inner qualities he had not inherited.

He was not supposed to know that much about clothing — though his father, apparently, had given him some good advice on leather shoes and suits. He was not supposed to have that particular Transatlantic accent. Nor those gestures. Nor that distinct knowledge on specific subjects.

None of it belonged to his birthright.

And that is why I am an advocate of this position:

Inner qualities — character, point of view, personal taste, cultural intelligence, social etiquette — know no boundaries. They are far from limited to the elite.

Which means: you, me, and millions of others across the globe can achieve the state we recognise in Cary Grant, or in the industrial heiresses of Slim Aarons’s photographs.

In the end — the most alluring quality is the ability to exist without the need to be noticed. And without the sense of eagerness that gives one away.

This is the state we recognise in the most elegant person in any room.

Elegance and ease cannot be separated. And the idea of reaching the state of “I do not have to prove anything to anyone” is the key to entering it.

Which completes the circle of the question we opened with:

What makes some people effortlessly attractive?

Even when we have seen no logo on their clothes, on their car, or on their watches.

To be elegant is to be willing for the hard life.

Not in the usual sense — but in a way that contradicts what contemporary society rewards.

It is no longer an obligation. It is no longer an expectation. It is not immediately rewarded through engagement metrics.

It takes a long time to begin to notice within yourself.

And a long time before others begin to notice it in you.

But it is a path that, once you have decided to walk it, you cannot simply return from.

This morning was different from most.

Normally I would drive to a local park where the hanging bar, the dip bar, and the 3-kilometre runway are used for training. But this morning, I was driving past the usual spot. Along the highway to the airport — with less traffic than usual. Of course, it was 4 a.m., and the city was surely silent. Only trucks, taxis, and the restless nocturnal creatures shared the road with me.

The idea was this.

Lately I have been thinking about the thing I wished I had done as a teenager. Watching Miami Vice. Seeing Don Johnson as Sonny Crockett in a black Ferrari Daytona — which I later learned was a replica built on a Corvette chassis. There is a special allure to that scenery. The idea of you, a car, and an empty road. Cruising along without any worry.

Decades later, I thought to myself:

The spot I ended up at, by 5.00 a.m., was the upper roofless parking area of an airport. I was the only person there, obviously.

The sun began to rise. The sky had turned blue and brighter over time. In my hand was a cup of iced black coffee, picked up from a 24-hour drive-through along the highway I had cruised. I stood there, beside my car, sipping the coffee — tasting the deep aroma of the northern-Thai beans — with the air of freedom flowing in and out of me.

I spotted two planes in the hour I stood there.

One arriving.

One departing.

The airport is a place I have always enjoyed. Whether picking up a friend, departing on my own, or, like this morning, simply being there — watching planes take off and land. The symbolism of it is likely the idea I adore:

The endless possibilities of how one life can be lived. The places one can go. The experiences that await in the unknown future.

No wonder the idea of the airport still lingers whenever I think of it — the romantic visual of the Golden Age of aviation, the glamour of air travel, airport style in the 1980s and 1990s, the jet-age destinations.

But the romance of solitude in the parking lot soon came to an end.

The tropical rain of Bangkok began its run, as the city awoke. And — with my shirt in pure silk from Ermenegildo Zegna, my trousers in linen, and suede fisherman sandals on my feet — this ensemble was far from friendly with water.

I opened the car door, started the engine, placed the remaining quarter of my coffee in the cup holder, and drove back to where I had come from.

Before the Friday roads began to get hectic.

Before the typical tempo of the city disrupted my agenda.

And once again — this suit is going to be one that fails to function as a suit, just like the first one. A tan-cream cotton seersucker, single-breasted.

I do not know why I love the idea of making a tailored bespoke piece — one that reflects the taste and worldview of my own, in the form of a suit — and having it be rebellious. Existing outside the expectation that society places on the function of it. But that, perhaps, is the thrill.

Imagine a navy suit that fails to be a navy suit. One that you cannot wear to the business meeting, the boardroom, the professional setting — unless you are the chairman, working in the tech sector, or holding enough leverage in the room that your decision affects the whole agenda.

This double-breasted suit, made of Solbiati Art du Lin: the jacket is unstructured, unlined, 6x1 configuration, low buttoning stance. The trousers are full-cut, wide leg opening, double reverse pleated, cuffed hem. Known, in effect, as a flowing with the wind suit. Beautifully drapes, without any rigidity. A suit to be lived in.

Very Richard Gere in his breakthrough film — American Gigolo (1980).

But why am I so obsessed with the suit?

To be honest, even I — who consider myself a man deeply devoted to sartorial matters, a connoisseur, in and out of the industry — I rarely wear a full suit anymore. Perhaps it is the fact that I am living in Bangkok now. But even in Milan earlier this year, I also preferred odd jacket and odd trousers.

So why do I keep dreaming of, imagining, and desiring the experience —

Of selecting fabric.

Of talking with the clothier.

Of choosing the details of the garment.

Of the feeling of a measuring tape around my body —

Knowing that the piece will be mine, and mine alone?

And then there is the recent Ralph Lauren Purple Label & Polo Spring/Summer 2027 menswear collection — the talk of the town, and the thing that stormed my social media feed. I found myself thinking out loud: “God, these models look so good.”

Even after the hundred or so times that Ralph Lauren — both as a brand and as an individual — has portrayed this aesthetic.

The dinner jacket worn with cream trousers. A tailored jacket paired with shorts and fisherman sandals. Even the slim-fit Polo-line pinstripe suits that I know, for sure, only look good on a specific type of body.

That runway show reminded me of why I fell in love with tailoring in the first place.

They are a reminder of where I have come from — and of how I can become the person I want to be.

It reminds me of the first time I bought a very poor-quality off-the-rack navy suit for $100, and felt like Sean Connery in From Russia With Love — even though the fit was completely off.

The first time I went to a local tailor and commissioned a linen, high-waisted, double forward-pleated pair of trousers — even though the resulting silhouette was a disaster, and I basically wasted the $250. Because once my knowledge and taste had developed enough to realise what my ideal silhouette actually looked like, I could not bear to look at the mirror.

And I guess — this is the reason.

Even though practically, culturally, and realistically, the modern world dictates that suits no longer need to be worn in daily life. Even though commissioning one — which certainly costs some money — will likely mean the piece hangs in the closet more than it is worn.

Though I always try to come up with creative ways to wear it out as often as possible.

It is like a guilty pleasure, I think.

One that logically is not enough to justify.

But that serves as an emotional anchor. As identity reinforcement. Something that happens to be worn — even though it is worn less often than a pair of vintage Brooks Brothers wool trousers I bought for $15, which turned out to be the garment I wear almost daily.

When we hear the term, what comes to mind is the image of skyscrapers, cars running on the road in their hectic jam, millions of lives held together by two opposing pressures — the hope of a better life and the basic mechanics of survival. Both, at the same time.

Ask anyone who was born in such an environment, or has lived in it for a very long time, and they will likely admit to a quiet draining. A hidden desire to escape. At the very least, the wish to take a break — to a small town along a mountain creek, or a coastal boulevard.

Yet for those far from the noise of car horns, far from the countless mega-buildings raised in the International Style; the metropolis still appears as a sign of the advancement of humanity. The progression of mankind.

Which is not far from the truth. The metropolis is, in many ways, a direct by-product of the past two centuries of industrial revolution. But the price most people pay for it — is soul siphoning.

The phrase may sound exaggerated. But the phenomenon — of millions of people coexisting in dense proximity, and yet the loneliness crisis that has arisen alongside that density, and the never-ending pursuit of capitalist accumulation that defines modern metropolitan life — is not far from the experience of a soul being drained by the essence of the big city. New York. London. Tokyo. Whatever name you give it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have no intention to revolt against the nature of the human condition — in this case, the form of capitalist economy, and the many modern phenomena that have grown out of the psychology of mankind. At the largest scale, it is what it is.

But for the metropolitan reader who is done with endlessly drifting through the city without joy, unable to find beauty in it — I think this piece will give you something worth carrying:

A way of living in the big city differently than others. And of finding the hidden beauty within it.

What is “Modernity”?

The word is widely used today — as the term that describes the present moment, the current years, the era one is living in. But when you look deeply into how it actually came about, it reveals a surprising character. One I expect most of you are already familiar with.

The word modern comes from the Latin modernus, meaning “just now” or “of the present age”. It was already being used in late antiquity to distinguish the present from the ancient past. But what historians call modernity really begins between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries — with the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, industrialisation, and the rise of the modern city.

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” — Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?, 1784

So to say: the deepest meaning of modernity is not technology. It is a new way of seeing reality.

Premodern societies generally looked backward for authority — to tradition, to religion, to ancestors, to established institutions like the monarchy. Modern societies increasingly look forward. They assume that the future can be different from the past. That knowledge can grow. That institutions can be redesigned. That individuals can question inherited truths.

In that sense, a person from eighteenth-century Paris and a person from twenty-first-century New York already share the same psychological world — even if their technologies are vastly different.

The most charming, and the most difficult, character of the modern is the rise of the individual.

In traditional societies, identity was largely given. You were born into a family, a religion, a social rank, and a place. In the modern world, identity becomes something to be constructed.

The question changes — from “What is my place?” to “Who am I?”

Yet while this shift creates freedom, anxiety also emerges in its shadow.

Many of the psychological struggles people associate with the twenty-first century — economic uncertainty, the crisis of purpose, the spike in loneliness — are all rooted in older questions. Questions of meaning, of authenticity, of self-expression, of alienation. None of these questions are new.

This, then, is the paradox of city life. One that has been going on for three hundred years.

And one that has not yet been solved.

“The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.” — Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903

Metropolis — as famously rendered in the iconic 1927 film by the Austrian-born German director Fritz Lang — was a silent meditation on social-class differentiation. The elite versus the labour. The upper echelon versus the lower one. The very same story one can see in every major city, in the past century or even now.

The metropolis is a direct by-product of civilization entering the modern era. It concentrates capital, knowledge, labour, political power, innovation, and media — all within a single big city.

Without the metropolis, there is no industrial revolution in the form we know it. No mass journalism. No Silicon Valley. No Wall Street. No rapidly shifting creative industries.

That said, there are seductive qualities to being metropolitan.

I do not personally know you, but I take it we have all heard, or experienced, the idea of “I’m going to make it in New York” — or in any major city of your country. The idea where people from all across the provinces aim, in some form, to move into the metropolis. To set the intention of making something significant there.

While the small village — the peaceful place many were born into — told them:

“This is who you are.”

The whisper from the metropolis tells them:

“Who do you want to become?”

It promises opportunity, reinvention, excitement, and the feeling that one is standing close to where the future is being made.

It also offers an endless stream of novelty. New cafés. New exhibitions. New technologies. New conversations. New fashions. New experiences. It is almost impossible to feel that one has exhausted everything a metropolis has to offer.

But this seduction comes with the paradox I have teased earlier.

Infinite choice can become overwhelming. Constant movement can make it difficult to slow down. Anonymity gives you freedom — and can also leave you feeling invisible. Ambition surrounds you — and creates relentless competition.

The metropolis amplifies every aspect of human life. While it can make you feel more inspired, more connected, more ambitious — it also makes you more anxious, more isolated, more restless.

Perhaps that is why the metropolis has become one of the defining symbols of modernity itself — an endless source of cultural material for writers, filmmakers, and artists to observe, to study, and to express through their own forms. Cinema, in particular.

No matter the city — New York, Tokyo, London, Bangkok, or Dubai — they all project the same message:

The future is happening here.

And people are drawn to that message because, deep down, humans are attracted not just to comfort, but to possibility.

The metropolis’s true offer to us is the feeling that our life could become larger than it is today.

And also its greatest illusion.

Because while a metropolis can transform your circumstances, it cannot, by itself, answer the deeper human questions of meaning, belonging, or contentment.

Those have to come from somewhere else.

And this — is where the figure of the flâneur becomes important.

The flâneur emerged in nineteenth-century Paris precisely because the modern metropolis was becoming faster, busier, and increasingly driven by commerce. And while most people experienced the city as workers, consumers, or commuters — moving with a purpose — the flâneur did something radically different.

He wandered without destination. He observed without trying to possess. He turned the city into something to contemplate rather than something to conquer.

In other words: the flâneur slowed modernity down.

In a world obsessed with productivity, he chose attention. In a city driven by consumption, he practiced observation. In a society that measured people by what they did, he valued seeing over doing. He was not rejecting the metropolis — he was refusing to let its pace dictate his consciousness.

The flâneur concept remains applicable today, although the environment has changed.

The metropolis still rewards speed, efficiency, productivity, and constant movement. Most people unconsciously adopt that rhythm. But the city also contains quieter dimensions — ones that are easy to overlook.

My own practice begins with living the day at a different cadence than most people around me.

Not for the productivity-guru reason of waking at four in the morning to gain a competitive advantage. But to allow myself to gain autonomy over my own tempo — and to see the city move around me from a different angle.

The early morning drive to an old-town café with a balcony, to catch the golden morning sunlight. To see monks doing their alms-gathering walk. To sit still in a quiet city park in the late afternoon and read a good book. The walk along a quiet alley, where unexpected places, people, and events can be encountered without intention.

In essence: I have shifted from consuming the city to paying attention to it.

So, ladies and gentlemen — perhaps the real opposite of the metropolis is not the countryside.

It is mindlessness.

And the simple act of establishing a daily or weekly ritual — to walk, to drive, to move without destination, to put attention on what is actually there around you, beyond the abstract mass of millions in a square, beyond the abstract mass of big buildings — to the actual texture of a particular city, in its specific form —

I do think this alone can serve as a reminder that you can live in the metropolis without surrendering entirely to its rhythm.

The city may move at high speed.

But your mind does not have to.

Mostly well known for the golden shimmering of temples, the long walls of the Grand Palace, and a bright tropical sun — that is the visual of this city through the lens of travellers and cultural mass perception. But most of the time, including the morning at the beginning of this weekday, the place has always held a different tempo.

Seamless roads. Effortless parking. Walking along to a café that resembles a patisserie in Paris. At my usual spot: the balcony that allows me to absorb the moment and come to the thought —

“This is a life that few would experience.”

There is a chance you might read that thought as a snobbish voice. Trust me, it is the opposite.

Even for me, sometimes.

Because the urge to take photos, to check emails, to check social media, to see whatever the world is up to — is there all the time. Even with the quiet morning. Even with monks doing their alms-gathering walk. Even with the noise of the city that has yet to come. At the most peaceful vantage point, it is still happening.

I do not have the answer to it. Not yet, and perhaps not for a long while.

What I do have is this morning. The espresso, gone slightly cool by now. The temple monastery across the road, catching the early light against its tiered roof. A motorcycle that passes and then is gone. The sound of a metal shutter being lifted, somewhere down the street.

And the small, persistent recognition — sitting here on this balcony, on this Tuesday — that the answer to the question I have just asked myself is being given, quietly, by the morning itself.

Sit longer. Notice more. Resist the next thing for a little longer than the day before.

The question of why presence is so difficult does not need to be solved in one morning. It only needs to be held, gently, while the morning continues to happen.

Which, in the end, is what the balcony is for.

“Guilt. I felt very guilty doing this.”

That was the first form of thought that occurred whenever I tried to break out from the dynamic of endless work-stream that drives me all the time. I have come to realise that the creative-professional kind of career is both a gift and, in its own way, a curse. On the gifted side, you automatically notice that the value of your work is detached from sheer volume — as long as the idea is sharp and the execution justifies the idea, the work is done right.

But the same essence comes with the fact that your brain is the engine of everything. And it is likely to run all the time, from the moment you wake up.

The thing is, when I finish one objective my brain has set out to solve, another problem is already waiting in the unconscious — and, as you can guess, in the modern world of hyper-stimulation and constant connection, it becomes a never-ending spiral of ideas to tackle. Some of them productive. Most of them miscellaneous, leading nowhere but to another spike of Dopamine.

The solution I have found, however, is environment.

I had heard before that changing environment plays a huge difference in one’s state of mind. I had always assumed this meant geographic change — moving from city to city, the way I have done across a single year of travel. What I had never noticed was that it also applies to the very same room.

My apartment is fifty-six square metres. Four rooms.

The living room is the one I rarely entered.

Imagine an evening. Dusk arrived. Most of the time — if I was not working till that hour — I would doing the flâneur ritual; dress in my evening attire, take a transport to a niche bar, see people, or call a friend and end up in his place.

But when I began to dive into the world of design — learning the classic pieces of Eames and Saarinen, even the gadget world of Bang & Olufsen — I started putting many of these vintage pieces into the very empty living room. Orchestrating them, slowly, into a sanctuary that serves only one function…

At first, the guilty feeling will still happen. You will experience the frustration of asking: Is there not a better thing to be doing than this? Shouldn’t I go out? Shouldn’t I work more?

But trust me — within a curated space, one filled with objects that are well-designed, well-crafted, well-functioning; art pieces that evoke something in your soul; perhaps a drink as companion, a good book, or even nothing in your hand — just sitting still, observing your own thought, seeing what emerges without immediately jumping to do something else…

To actually pause between the long, long day. It is the hardest practice. And it is more essential than ever.

Especially in a world where the space and the time to do so are becoming less and less.

Previously, I used to believe that this city did not match the level of sophistication of the heritage capitals of Europe — at least within my own preferences and my advocacy for the classic register.

If you cannot quite imagine the level of difference, I will tell you this: whenever you put on a tailored jacket here — yes, the kind with proper lapels, construction, and structured fabric — no matter how casual the rest of your ensemble may be, you will automatically be dressing above the norm.

The perception is perfectly understandable.

Bangkok is an oriental culture, not a continental one — and it is no wonder that jackets, dress shoes, and leather footwear are far from the typical sights of day-to-day life. For most of Bangkok’s history — and the city has only existed in its present form for roughly a century and a half — the Western aesthetic ideal has been operative only for about the last hundred years.

The style you might see in the archives of 1800s London, or 1900s Paris, was certainly not what the civilians of Bangkok were wearing — not even during the mid-century. (Social parties and business were usually the only contexts in which someone in 1960s Bangkok would put on a suit or evening wear.)

However, my recent approach to dressing here — and likely in Paris this coming autumn — has begun to overcome that asynchronous dressing language: between the modern and the old world, between the oriental and the continental.

Which has led me to the single component rarely talked about, or deeply discussed, in any fashion publication or by any style writer:

Silhouette — and how it connects with identity, with cultural register, and with the ability to achieve elegance regardless of how different the clothes you are wearing may be from what the people in your city, in the current era, are wearing.

It is, in short, the term that gives you access to a genuine personal approach to style.

“Why do people care so much about style?”

Or, more plainly: why give so much thought to clothes when their only physical function is to regulate body temperature?

I do not know whether you, reading this, still hold that question — but if you do, or if you cannot fully articulate why investing mental energy on putting on clothes daily matters, then I hope this piece will clarify it.

I will begin with an analogy.

If the only purpose of clothing were temperature regulation, then by that logic architecture should not matter — because a concrete box keeps the rain out just as well as a cathedral. Music should not matter, because spoken words already communicate information. Art should not matter, because a blank wall serves the same structural function as a painted one.

Before you say a single word, people already learn something about you from how you present yourself. Whether that is fair or unfair is a separate debate, but it is undeniably true. The way one dresses always communicates values, personality, attention to detail, cultural affiliation, profession, mood, and even ambition. Think of a military uniform, a judge’s robe, a doctor’s coat, a monk’s garment — none of these exist solely to regulate body temperature. They exist to transmit information.

Now, what is interesting is that many people who claim not to care about style actually have a style of their own.

The person who announces “I do not care about clothes” and then wears the same grey T-shirt every day is also communicating something — practicality, efficiency, indifference to fashion, or a focus on other priorities.

And yes, that is still a style.

What many people really object to is not style itself, but vanity, consumerism, and the obsession with status that sometimes surrounds fashion. Which is a fair criticism.

But style and vanity are not the same thing.

Function gets the job done. Style is what transforms function into meaning. And human beings have always cared about meaning far more than they admit.

Speaking of style — here is the interesting part.

While the internet bombards you with terminology like great style, classic style, old-money style — and then shows you images containing certain aesthetics that resemble those terms — the substance behind it is far beyond the actual clothes themselves.

It begins with your values, your worldview, your ambitions, your taste, your standards, and the way you interpret life. The clothes are simply one of many ways those internal qualities become visible.

That is why truly stylish people often have consistency across everything they do. The way they dress, the way they speak, the way they work, the way they design something, the way they drive, the way they decorate a room, the way they solve a problem — even the way they make decisions — all seem connected by the same underlying philosophy.

What most people call style online is often just aesthetic imitation: copying the outer symbols of a lifestyle without embodying the beliefs that created it.

Someone can buy every piece associated with “old money style” and still not feel convincing — because they are wearing the appearance of a worldview rather than expressing their own. On the other hand, someone with a strong sense of self can wear very simple clothes and still come across as highly stylish, because there is coherence between who they are and how they present themselves.

The empirical evidence is in the people the public has labelled style icons. Recently, two names have stormed the internet and their images appear everywhere you look: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.

People usually analyse the minimalist coats, the sunglasses, the tailoring, the clean silhouettes — romanticising the aesthetic of the 1990s. But what they are really responding to is the mythology surrounding them. They represented youth, beauty, romance, privilege, tragedy, and a kind of effortless American aristocracy. The clothing became iconic because it appeared to be the natural extension of who they were. The style and the story were inseparable.

The same applies to Cary Grant, to Audrey Hepburn — the clothes worked because they seemed to belong to a character already fully formed.

That is why I do not see personal style as a fashion concept, or as an immense passion for fashion knowledge — otherwise, those names above would not be cherished as icons of style — but more as the consistent external expression of an internal identity, of which clothing is part.

In that sense, style is not really about dressing well. It is about becoming so clear about who you are and what you stand for that everything around you begins to reflect it naturally. The clothes then stop being the foundation of style and become merely one of its many visible consequences.

And perhaps this is the only secret to having a great style of your own:

To live a life so fully, so deeply, and so cultivated daily that it becomes unmistakably yours.

This is not to say that external influence does not come into play. In the end, environment, the details around you, and the information you expose yourself to all play a crucial role in shaping who you are — but you need to curate it. To choose what to expose yourself to. To bring real consciousness to what you absorb. To cultivate, in short, your own taste. (I have written separately on how to cultivate taste; here.)

Now — here is the big question I have left unanswered since the beginning:

How do you express your personal style, wearing the garments you advocate, without alienating yourself from modern culture, from your sub-tribe — and still achieve elegance?

This is the moment where silhouette enters our interest.

Personal style, as the term suggests, leans heavily on the individual side rather than the collective. Within the larger category of style, personal style serves as the specific way of doing a certain thing. In our matter, it is the specific way of dressing.

For a discerning mind — one who has begun to cultivate taste in clothes, or at least desires to put real intention into wearing them daily — the realm opens: from types of garment to colour, to material, to higher levels of fashion knowledge.

The thing is, not every garment applies elegantly to the contemporary era we are living in.

Speaking as a man who adores tailoring more than anything else, I can firmly say that the tailored jacket is one of the central pieces of this asynchrony in the present day. While you can get away with it in many capitals of Europe, or in other cities that have ingrained the tailoring language for centuries, many parts of the world do not support the fluency of tailoring.

You may have your own taste in a specific way of dressing, or a certain garment, that is out of sync with the modern — something the masses no longer wear on a daily basis.

Now, silhouette, as I have teased many times in this piece, comes into play as the changing element.

I want you to imagine standing in front of a bright light.

The simple definition of the term is this: the outline, or the overall shape, of a person, object, or figure as seen against a contrasting background. Applied to style, it is the overall shape created by the relationship between your body and your clothing.

For instance — a jacket can give the variety of shapes: boxy, V, straight. Trousers are the same — slim, straight, wide, flared. Basically: they change your outline, even though your exact body is the same.

And that is why the very same garments, by different designers, give you a different emotion.

Classically, in the menswear scene — or in the traditional feminine wardrobe of the 1950s — one tradition shaped by Savile Row and another by Paris haute couture, both created the V-shape: a structured, distinct silhouette associated with authority, athleticism, and stability.

Later, the designer Hubert de Givenchy cast a spell on Audrey Hepburn, giving her elegance through the column — a long, uninterrupted vertical line.

Or, later still, the famous 1980s fluid drape pioneered by Giorgio Armani and Yohji Yamamoto, which gave the same type of garment — the suit — a new character: a relaxed silhouette, letting fabric do the work in an almost excessive way, creating an effect that was creative, at ease, artistically expressive.

Now, here is the deeper part.

Most people think silhouette is a technical fashion concept.

I believe it is actually a psychological one.

Because silhouette determines how a person occupies space — and that influences how they are perceived. And that serves as the perfect bridge between personal affection and cultural relevance.

Many assume that if they love a particular garment, period, or aesthetic, they must preserve it exactly as it originally existed. But clothing does not exist in isolation. It exists within a cultural and visual environment. Every era develops its own sense of proportion, movement, formality, and visual language.

What made a garment feel natural in 1950 may feel theatrical in 2026 — not because the garment became worse (in many cases, far from it), but because the surrounding culture has changed. Because the dressing language of society no longer speaks in that manner.

This is where silhouette becomes powerful. It allows someone to preserve the emotional qualities that attracted them to a style in the first place, while adapting its visual form to contemporary life.

Rather than asking “How do I make this garment work today?” the more useful question becomes:

“What qualities does this garment represent, and what silhouette would express those qualities naturally in the modern world?”

In that sense, silhouette is a translation tool. One that allows affection for a specific aesthetic to remain alive in the day and night of the current era.

Take my own affection for classic menswear as an example.

I love the world of tailored jackets, pleated trousers, leather footwear, and the elegance associated with traditional menswear. But over time, I realised that what I loved was not necessarily the exact appearance of a 1956 English gentleman — more so the qualities. Confidence. Sophistication. Maturity. Ease. Masculinity. Presence.

The core problem was that the original silhouette of much traditional English tailoring was designed for a society that no longer exists. The highly structured drape suit, the heavy brogued oxford, the rigid business formality — all belonged to a different cultural ecosystem. When transplanted unchanged into modern life, they can sometimes feel more like historical re-enactment than personal style.

By contrast, the fluid tailoring of 1990s Armani retained many of the same values I admired — elegance, confidence, refinement, masculine ease — but expressed them through a silhouette that felt more compatible with contemporary sensibilities.

The same applies in womenswear.

While the admiration for Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis can still be seen across any Pinterest board or Instagram feed, very few women today dress as exact reproductions of the 1960s.

A contemporary woman wearing a beautifully cut oversized blazer, straight-leg trousers, and minimalist flats — garments quite different from those of the mid-century — may actually capture more of Audrey Hepburn’s spirit than someone wearing a perfect vintage replica.

The real task, then, lies in the act of extracting the values hidden inside the garments and specific styles you have affection for, and asking:

“If I want to integrate these values into my own life and my own style — what would their silhouette look like today?”

The best way — and this is what I have cultivated for myself — is to let yourself be exposed to media that goes beyond the norm. Specifically: beyond what the algorithm feeds you. To open yourself to both old and new, to still images and moving frames. You will begin to see the variety of silhouettes that reflect the culture of each era, and the identity of each figure.

In my case, it traces back to old Hollywood, then to the European New Wave of the mid-century, and now I have begun to study many of the blockbusters of the late century — surprisingly, even Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven gave me a lesson on silhouette that shifted the way I approach tailoring.

Once you become clear on the qualities you aspire to, films, photography, architecture, art, advertisements, historical figures, contemporary creatives, and even objects outside of fashion will begin to give you recurring visual patterns — patterns you will begin to adopt into your daily approach to dressing.

You may notice that the people, places, and images that consistently captivate you all share similar proportions, shapes, rhythms, or ways of occupying space. Perhaps they have long vertical lines. Fluid movement. Relaxed structure. Strong geometric forms.

That is where silhouette enters the picture.

And when you look at the term through this lens, it becomes the common thread that transforms abstract values into visible form.

In my case, it is the person who admires the confidence of Cary Grant, the ease of 1990s Armani, the elegance of Italian architecture, and the restraint of mid-century design — and who has eventually discovered that all of those influences point toward the same silhouette: relaxed, elongated, understated, yet controlled.

At that point, finding clothes becomes much easier — because you are no longer searching for random pieces. Instead, you are searching for garments that contribute to a larger visual idea.

Discovering your silhouette is really the process of discovering your aesthetic identity.

And one thing you can be sure of: it is not invented in a fitting room. It is uncovered through a conversation between your inner values and the visual culture that speaks most deeply to you.

When that happens, the clothes become the final translation of something you first recognised through years of observing the world around you.

All of which, inevitably, makes every act of putting on clothes more romantic — an experience to look forward to, daily.

The ability to immediately book a resort, grab a leather weekender, and put on a good pair of suede leather sandals — with the imagery of sunlight, sea breeze, and the serene ambience of Thailand’s low season — is the kind of thing that should feel close to perfect.

But no matter how glamorous it seemed, no matter which song I tried to attune to the mood across the 300 kilometre ride, I felt nothing for the full three hours.

At first, nothing interrupted me.

I treated the drive the way one treats most modern transportation — the act of moving from point A to point B as conveniently as possible. But the longer I sat with the mid-week escapade itself, the more I began to notice the root of it.

The car I was driving was a Honda.

Honestly, there is nothing wrong with the Japanese manufacturer. They have produced plenty of admirable cars, from the economic to the exotic. But the problem lies in the economic — the Honda I had inherited from my family is that type.

Reliable.

Sensible.

Without any sensory life of its own.

With that realization, the impulse that had been lying quietly within me for some time surfaced clearly: the idea of acquiring a new automobile, one that actually gives soul, experience, and justifies the longing for elegance I seek in every other aspect of life.

That led me back to a very particular era — the 1990s.

Elegance, in my humble opinion, still reigns supreme in the mid-century. The manifestation in automobiles from those days — from economy to icon — wrapped design, material, and the spirit of mechanics in the most graceful way possible. But as a man who grew up in the 90s and 2000s, the car culture of that decade stands as the Golden Age for me. Companies still built cars because engineers cared about the driving feel itself. Not beautiful but impractical, not astonishing but emotionally hollow — beautiful and engaged. Astonishing and alive.

The clearest example, to me, is the BMW 5 Series E39.

There is a reason why this sport executive saloon from the late 90s to early 2000s is widely considered the most complete 5 Series by many enthusiasts, whether they are Bimmer fans or not.

The E39 combined everything the brand historically stood for in one coherent object — restrained and timeless design, near-perfect chassis balance, hydraulic steering full of tactile feedback, naturally aspirated inline-6 or V8 engines with mechanical character, autobahn-level stability, executive refinement, and enough analog simplicity to still feel intimate and alive decades later.

It was not the fastest car BMW ever made, nor the most luxurious, nor the most technologically advanced. But it achieved a rare harmony between sportiness, elegance, comfort, engineering integrity, and emotional involvement.

A human sensory experience still sitting at the centre of the design philosophy — rather than software ecosystems and algorithmic convenience.

Or rather: the charm of the analog era, beginning to fade day by day.

What surprised me, sitting with all of this on the way back from the coast, was how an object — a mere car, a mere mid-week drive — could play such a quiet role in revealing what one actually values. Not what one says one values but ‘what one cannot help but feel the absence of.’

While the world has moved in a particular direction; there are those who stand still with themselves anyway, think carefully about life, put a discerning mind to the question of substance, and question the price of turning ordinary existence into hyper-utility, performance-for-vanity, and comfort-as-the-only-good.

Whichever side one is on, or whatever one concludes — at least one has taken some hold on the paradigm that otherwise contains the will of the individual.

And in many cases, it can start from an object.

A single one.

The one you always come back to, always feel a specific energy from, and eventually notice has begun to become part of who you are.