September 2026
I’ve noticed that many people like to present themselves as cultured and refined.
Watch them in the concert hall. Their heads droop, jerk upright, droop again, jerk upright again. Their bodies have already given them away: they are bored. Their minds are still desperately trying to keep up appearances. They dare not fall asleep; classical music, after all, is “high art.” And they certainly dare not admit that they do not like what they are hearing—not with musicians onstage and the names of revered composers printed in the program.
Their first instinct is always to suspect themselves: Maybe I don’t know enough. Maybe I’m not cultured enough. Maybe I can’t hear what is so profound about it.
They never consider the simpler explanations: maybe the performer’s interpretation is mediocre; maybe the piece really is too long; maybe even composers enshrined in music history sometimes wrote badly.
Their way of respecting art is to castrate their own senses.
For two hours, they fight sleep and shift restlessly in their seats. But the instant the final note dies away, they come fully alive. They are the first to shout “Bravo!” and the first to leap to their feet and applaud. The heads that kept falling toward their chests are now held high, as if those two hours had cleansed their souls rather than tested their ability to stay awake.
They do not come to the concert hall just to hear the music. They also come to be seen as the kind of people who listen to it.
They perform for their friends, to prove they know how to appreciate art. They perform for Instagram, to prove there is more to their lives than food, work, and shopping: formalwear, champagne, concert programs, and a concert-hall location tag placed just so.
Many of them play instruments themselves. Yet when they run into friends at intermission, they rarely talk about what they have just heard. Instead: “What do you play?” “What grade did you get to?” “Who did you study with?” After twenty minutes of swapping credentials and trying to outdo one another, they go back to their seats and carry on pretending to be sophisticates.