The most insane life goal is one almost everyone has

Are you expanding or narrowing the range of situations in which you can enjoy life?

When my friend Anya said you couldn’t miss him, she wasn’t lying.

Six foot plenty and the same again around the middle, if this Richard fellow’s tailor charged by the item rather than the metre, he was missing an entire bag of tricks.

And if Wittgenstein were right when he said that ‘the human body is the best picture of the human soul’, then this soul had trouble lodged in every crevice.

Richard waddled toward us dressed in the chalk-striped charcoal suit of a 1930s gangster turned 1980s futures trader, a pair of sinister leather gloves completing the psychotic killer businessman look.

HIs clothes didn’t just offer insight into his life, they were a replacement for it. These clothes didn’t make the man… they were the man. Like they are for every other ‘empty suit’ – every articulate-but-overly-simplistic, unaware-of-their-knowledge-boundaries, answer-for-everything-understanding-of-nothing, bullshit-bingo-spouting everyman, everywhere from the slick streets of the City of London to the circus sandpits of Dubai.

Richard took one sip of the wine Anya and I were drinking and dismissed it as swill.

‘I can’t drink this,’ he said, as he lurched over to grab the wine list, all onlookers wincing in sympathy for the table.

After scanning the options in a way designed to suggest he knew what he was doing, he ordered, naturally, the most expensive thing on there. While he was clearly no stranger to keeping the sommelier’s corkscrew busy, I’m pretty confident we could have handed him a glass of a 2009 Chateau Margaux and he’d have reacted in the same way. This was a power play, not a taste test.

You’ve all seen the same thing countless times, of course. From wine wankers to health-food snobs making a point of dismissing the origins of a loaf of sourdough or insisting on specific sprouting times for their seeds, there are boorish oafs everywhere that are satisfied only when their coffee comes from the poop of unicorns fed on a diet of caviar and foie gras, and only then when they’re the ones introducing it to you, and not the other way around.

If this sort of behaviour enhanced the experience – took taste buds to pioneering new lands and expanded the universe of possible pleasures, you could at least make a case for it. But of course that’s not what happens. Richard hadn’t succeeded in making the best wine taste any better. All he’d done was make all other wines taste worse, thereby reducing his options for enjoyment.

It’s not just the tailor-challenging, airport-shop-accessorised, waddling billboards like Richard who advertise their insecurities with their attitudes towards wine lists. They’re simply the easier ones to spot.

‘Public transport? Ugh!’

‘I only fly business or first these days. It’s so worth it.’

‘The hours are a bit worse, and the work isn’t quite as interesting, but the pay’s better, so…’

‘I saw this place on Instagram…’

The point isn’t to argue about which ‘things’ are or are not ‘worth it’. It's to ask yourself: where does it stop?

Does it have to be this way?

Which of my own behaviours come from the same torpid ‘thinking’ as Richard’s approach to everything, full of the sound of price tags, and the fury of finding an allegedly objective measurement for things that can’t be measured?

Rephrased as: ‘I'm consciously choosing to narrow the universe of situations in which I can feel okay about life’, or ‘I am very heavily reliant on external circumstances for me to live beautifully, and on top of this I'm very keen for everyone to know this about me’, no one would say such things, let alone boast about them. And yet do they not mean the same?

Even if Richard did know what he was talking about, so what? Knowledge of wine is a long way from the wisdom to enjoy time with the ‘friends’ you’re sharing it with.

(If indeed using ‘friends’ is in any way appropriate in relation to people with a lack of self-awareness so shocking it would take the breath away from a corpse, because they probably don’t have any real ones.)

Some people surround themselves with shiny surfaces, creating a world of mirrors, while failing to see in any of them who they really are. When looked into with attention tilted towards promises of synthetic meaning, experiencing any insights in these shiny surfaces is like trying to tickle yourself: it’s impossible and you look like a tit.