Why Are Appearances So Important?

And can we do something about it?

aerial view of a city made of facades without buildings, like a film set, realistic digital art — by DALL·E

In Phillip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, the two child protagonists walk into a ghost town where all adults have disappeared, devoured by spectres. Depending on whom we listen to, we may wonder if much would be lost if that were the case, or if our reality is too different from such literary dystopia. Indeed, the number of people who abide by appearances is alarmingly high. Sometimes, I feel like I walk through a city made of facades, like a cheap film set in which a peek around the corner is all it takes to reveal the trick.

This type of scene is the opposite of everything I have attempted to choose for my life. As a child, I suspected some of what perturbed the grownups was nonsense. By the time I was an adolescent, I was positive appearances ranked far too high in most people’s priority lists. One boasts about their child, the other claims their job to be critical for the advancement of humanity, and a third swears their neighbourhood is becoming more exclusive by the day. Often, the only common ground such individuals would find involved selecting a fourth person as the target of their criticism. As I finish this paragraph, I find myself gasping for air. How can folk live like this?

The reason for such ridiculousness is evident: the network effect. We are inherently curious and…