The Death of Decorum
Decorum is an old word. Today it sounds ornamental, like something to do with manners or polite distance. People associate it with surfaces.
That was never its core meaning.
Decorum was about fit. About whether someone’s behavior made sense in light of the situation they were in. About carrying yourself in a way that matched the role you occupied and the weight that came with it.
Some positions demanded restraint. Others demanded authority. Sometimes silence mattered more than speech. The point was not virtue or performance. It was coherence.
A shepherd borrowing the voice of a ruler would have sounded wrong immediately, as if he were wearing clothes that did not belong to him. A ruler was expected to absorb pressure without complaint. When a judge began to seek attention, the office itself was already compromised.
Not because these people were better than others, but because their roles imposed limits. Those limits gave shape to conduct.
The Stoics took this seriously. For them, ethics did not begin with self-expression. It began with accepting the part you had been given and acting in a way that honored it. No fantasies. No escape hatches. Just the role that was actually yours.
That way of thinking assumed a world with weight.
For most of human history, people were not asked to invent themselves. That does not mean their lives were fair or gentle. It means something simpler: their place was largely settled before they were old enough to question it.
You learned what your family did by watching them do it. Skills were absorbed early, without being framed as choices. The land, the tools, the faces around you decided more than any inner calling ever did.
Villages stayed roughly the same size. Names repeated. Expectations were narrow. People rarely left. They argued, endured, suffered, but they knew where they stood.
Identity was not a puzzle to solve. It was a location you inhabited.
That stability made decorum possible. You could act fittingly because the situation itself did not keep rearranging.
Then modernity arrived, carrying its most seductive promise: you can be anything.
Sometimes this is true. Often enough to keep the promise alive.
Most of the time, it functions as an abstraction people are expected to live inside.
If you can be anything, nothing binds for long. If nothing binds, roles lose gravity. And once roles lose gravity, behavior floats.
This promise did not spread by accident.
“You can be anything” is not only a philosophical idea. It is also a commercial one. It works as a marketing slogan because it keeps people uncertain about who they are and uneasy about where they stand.
An anchored person is hard to sell to. Someone who knows their place, their limits, and their measure does not need constant upgrades. A person who feels provisional, who suspects they are always one version behind, is a much better customer.
The modern economy thrives on this instability. It feeds on the distance between who someone is and who they imagine they could still become. Self-optimization fills the space where older forms of dignity once lived.
In that sense, the erosion of decorum is not collateral damage. It is functional. A stable role narrows desire. A fixed identity limits consumption. A life with clear boundaries does not scale well as a market.
So the mantra repeats itself everywhere: reinvent yourself, upgrade, pivot, rebrand. What looks like freedom often turns out to be restlessness redirected. What looks like possibility is frequently a distraction from the only thing actually being sold.
This is where the cost begins to show.
Choice sounds empowering until it becomes total. Then it turns brittle. A role you choose can always be undone, and people sense that, even if they never put it into words. What can be put on easily never quite settles into the body.
We dismantled the structures that once told people, early and without apology, where they belonged. In their place we installed a single demand: figure it out yourself, and make it work everywhere.
A few people are built for that. Most are not.
Most improvise. Most perform versions of themselves that never fully congeal. They adjust tone, posture, even values, depending on the room and the platform.
The modern self is not liberated. It is suspended.
Without stable roles, decorum collapses. Not because people stopped caring about dignity, but because dignity no longer has a clear outline.
Appropriate behavior presupposes a stable situation, something you can orient yourself against. When circumstances keep mutating, posture becomes guesswork. Over time, even the sense of proportion erodes, because there is nothing left that reliably tells you what matters more and what matters less.
In older societies, this was not an abstract problem. Today, most people move through several incompatible roles in a single day. One voice for work, another for friends, another online. Professional in the morning, ironic by evening, drained by night. The only continuous identity is fatigue.
We call this flexibility. It often feels more like fragmentation.
Decorum needs something solid underneath it. Modern life removed that solidity and seems confused by the result.
Previous generations had fewer options. They also had fewer identity crises. Less pressure to constantly redefine themselves. Less internal noise.
We have more freedom, but freedom without orientation does not feel spacious for long. It starts to feel like vertigo.
This is why the instability we sense is not only political or technological. It sits inside people.
Unlimited possibility sounds expansive until you try to live inside it. What is always reversible rarely feels fully real. Roles that can be abandoned at any moment invite half-commitment, and over time the self loses coherence without anyone quite noticing when it happened.
Modernity erased the old scripts and called it emancipation. A small minority can live without scripts. Most people cannot.
The stage is gone. The performance is still expected.
The modern self is not confused. It is unstable.
Roles no longer hold. Places dissolve. Expectations shift faster than character can adapt. People are asked to improvise entire lives without a shared grammar of conduct.
This is not freedom. It is exposure.
What used to be carried by family, craft, hierarchy, and place is now carried by individuals. By people who were never designed to hold that much alone.
Nothing external is coming back clean. No tradition will be restored without distortion. Waiting for that is a way of postponing responsibility.
The burden has moved inward.
If decorum returns at all, it will not come from nostalgia or rules. It will come from individuals who rebuild structure internally. Not authenticity. Not self-expression.
Self-command.
Becoming your own ground. Your own measure of what fits and what does not. Your own standard of dignity, regardless of how unstable the surroundings are.
This is not empowering language. It is not meant to be. It is work.
And once someone has done that work, quietly and without applause, they incur a responsibility.
Not to instruct.
Not to perform.
But to stabilize the space around them.
To act with restraint when others fragment. To carry form when none is provided. To make behavior legible again by embodying it, without commentary.
Foundations are not announced. They appear slowly, laid by people who can stand without leaning.
That is how decorum returns. Not as a revival. As a discipline.
And disciplines, once lived, leave traces.