There’s a particular kind of man you see at Southern Hills Country Club, if you spend enough time there. I never belonged — could never have afforded it — but I’ve been to my share of parties and events on those grounds over the years, the kind of place that has hosted major championships and carries itself accordingly. And there he is: a wealthy, well-established member, a man of real standing in this city, wearing a sport coat that has clearly been in service for twenty-five years. It doesn’t fit right anymore. The lapels are wrong for the decade. It sticks out among the newer jackets around him like a mistake nobody bothered to correct.
I remember one particular evening years ago, some fundraiser or another, watching a man like that work the room with total confidence, shaking hands, laughing easily, clearly comfortable in his own standing. Nothing about his manner suggested a man who’d let anything slip. And yet the coat told a different story than the rest of him did, and I couldn’t stop noticing the gap between the two.
I find myself endlessly curious about that man. Not contemptuous — curious. He has the means to walk into any store in Tulsa and buy something current. Somebody in his life surely knows how he looks. So why does nobody say anything?
The mirror doesn't lie, even when I want it to
I’m eighty-one. When I catch myself in the mirror some mornings, I feel every one of those years. That’s not a complaint. It’s just the plain, unglamorous truth of what a body does over eight decades, and I don’t know that anyone really gets used to it. I admire the men and women who’ve made peace with the visible signs of aging who don’t reach for cosmetic surgery or hair transplants to argue with what time has done. I admire that acceptance in others more easily than I’ve managed to fully practice it myself.
But here’s the distinction I’ve come to care about: accepting how I look is not the same thing as letting how I look slide. I have no interest in appearing younger than I am. I have a great deal of interest in not appearing like a man who’s stopped paying attention.
What real estate taught me about the drift
When I started in residential real estate, I wore a three-piece suit nearly every day for the first three or four years. That was simply what the job required, and more than that, it was what I believed a professional owed the people he was serving. Somewhere over the following decade or two, the whole industry loosened up. Clients came to showings in shorts and flip-flops, and agents followed, until a collared shirt and khakis became the professional norm rather than the exception. I understand why it happened. I even went along with it, mostly. But I watched an entire profession drift from formality to casualness by a thousand small permissions, none of which anyone quite decided on purpose.
That drift is the real subject here, more than any particular sport coat. It happens gradually, and it happens because comfort is always the path of least resistance, and because nobody along the way says, “Are you sure about this?” A profession can drift that way over twenty years without a single bad decision along the path — just a thousand small permissions, each one reasonable on its own, that add up to something nobody would have chosen if you’d shown them the whole arc at once. I suspect a wardrobe, or a whole way of presenting yourself to the world, drifts the same way. Nobody decides one day to stop caring. It just gets easier, year after year, to let the last decision stand instead of making a new one.
Nobody decides one day to stop caring. It just gets easier, year after year, to let the last decision stand instead of making a new one.
A discipline, not a performance
There’s real research behind the instinct I’m describing, and it isn’t about vanity, whatever the word might suggest. Psychologists call it “enclothed cognition” — the finding that what we wear doesn’t just change how others see us, it changes how we think and carry ourselves. People given a coat described as a doctor’s coat, in the original study, paid measurably closer attention to their work than people wearing the identical coat described as a painter’s smock. The clothing itself hadn’t changed. The meaning had.
A recent survey of older Americans found something that echoes this from a different angle: people who kept up regular grooming and self-care routines reported being happier, by a wide margin, than those who let those routines slide. A gerontologist quoted in that survey put the same idea more simply than I’ve managed to: dressing and grooming in later life isn’t about looking young. It’s about identity, and about dignity, and about staying engaged with the world rather than quietly withdrawing from it. That framing matters to me. I’m not trying to look forty. I’m trying not to look like a man who’s stopped participating in his own life.
I’m not trying to look forty. I’m trying not to look like a man who’s stopped participating in his own life.
I spend most of my days now at home, working on this platform in whatever is comfortable — shorts, a T-shirt, nothing anyone but my wife will ever see. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But I’ve become mindful of a boundary I don’t want to cross: when I leave the house, I want people to assume I got up that morning and dressed like I intended to be seen, not like I forgot the world was still out there. I’ve made myself a small, deliberate promise as a result — I update my wardrobe every year or two, whether I think I need to or not, specifically so I never become the man in the twenty-five-year-old sport coat, wondering why nobody said something. For anyone looking to start that same refresh, AARP’s grooming guide for men over 50 is a genuinely useful place to start.
What I still don't know about myself
Here’s the part I can’t resolve as neatly as I’d like. I can plan my closet. I can hold myself to a standard, check the mirror, replace what’s gotten tired before it becomes a habit I don’t notice. What I can’t fully know is whether some blind spot of my own is operating on me the same way it operates on that man at Southern Hills — some way I’ve let comfort win without realizing it, some drift I’m too close to see.
Maybe that’s the real lesson underneath all of this. Discipline about appearance is worth practicing, but it isn’t a guarantee against becoming, in some other way, the very thing you’ve been quietly determined not to become. I’d like to think someone who loves me would tell me, if it ever came to that. I suppose that’s exactly what everyone in that man’s life has probably been thinking too — that someone else will surely say something, so nobody ever quite does.
