If you try to be a computer, you will fail. You will end up as a bad version of a computer. You will not be able to do what it does, you will not be able to compete. It is just not possible. On the other hand, a computer can not be a human, and attempting to be one will result in its failure. You aren't going to be able to be perfect with a cold sterility, you aren't going to be able to recall any fact, you aren't going to be able to crank out dead lifeless language in the blink of an eye. You aren't going to be able to do that. What does the computer lack? Humanity, life, spirit. The technological realm does not posses this, it never will. This is beyond the material world.
People run away from human-ness in many ways. In style, wrinkle-resistant fabrics, weird synthetic fibers are a manifestation of this. In the rest of life there are so many examples of a sort of rejection of human-ness, trying to be technical beings. A sort of move away from art, music and literature reflects this. I am not only referring to high art or art music, but any art, any music. I mean simply human creation which possesses vulnerability, heart, personality, truth. If you listen to music from decades back, often it feels overly sentimental to our sensibilities today, it is because it was full with heart. Today, we are full with something else.
Many people speak of humanity in technical terms, many people mock sincerity and earnestness today. Many people have scared themselves away from being human, or the ways in which they feel human are the saddest ways, not the most brilliant or most meaningful. In style you see the attempt to always look like you just put your clothes on with wrinkle resistant fabrics. You also, on the other hand, see a total giving up, a total slobbishness. The slob side of things is more common than the obsession with perfection. They both reveal unhealthy responses to this crisis. The slob gives up because there is no point for him to try, he fully embraces the superiority of mechanical perfection and resigns himself to life as a beast in squalor. The wrinkle resistant athleisure man is being spiritually colonized by the machine.
The solution, the way forward, is a way out, a way deeper within ourselves. It is a path toward revealing more of our human-ness. Our style, Ivy/Prep, embodies this more than I think any other modern male style. Our style loves wrinkles, it loves wear and tear, it loves natural fabrics, it eschews "performance-sport" gear. There is a decorum of imperfection in our style. Imperfection reveals life, decorum implies an intentional acting on behalf of what is considered good taste. A decorum of imperfection is an intentional embrace of the human and life within what is considered good taste. Good taste is not technological, it is human, there is even a religious, spiritual side to this.
There is an elegance to the tie that doesn't look perfect, there is a nonchalance to the linen sport coat sleeves that are wrinkled under the summer sun, there is a sign of humanity in the socks that show the slightest bit of bunching due to having been worn all day. It is familiar, it is warm, it touches a spark within us, it speaks to our heart in a way that is difficult to explain. It is opening, rather than closing. Because many have run from what it really mean to feel human, it is actually uncomfortable to many today, uncomfortable in a way that emotions are uncomfortable. Sometimes we don't want to feel an emotion, we shut it out, we shut it down, to feel it is uncomfortable and we run and hide. There is the person who laughs uncomfortably when they hear bad news. They are diffusing the bad news because it is easier that way.
Attire as a joke, embracing full slobbishness, not caring and laughing about the idea of caring, these are all ways of running from something uncomfortable, something too real, something too human. The future path I suspect will only become more perilous, until it stops being so. If we give up, we become beasts. If we try to become perfect like a mechanical object, we are give up all that matters. Our style, Ivy/Prep, and a particular decorum of imperfection reaffirms Man and dignity as he ought to be affirmed, in all his greatness, in this modernity.