[Bae Su-kyeong] The high cost of elegance

“I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I’m not talking about a vacation. Of course, at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am. Are you following me?”

In the poem “I Have Decided,” Mary Oliver writes about the will to reorient one’s way of being.

Modern societies often celebrate their openness, emphasizing that individuals are free to move within a social hierarchy according to their abilities. Yet when success and failure are framed primarily as the outcomes of personal merit, falling behind is interpreted less as a structural condition than as an individual failure, a perceived inadequacy of the self. The fear of loss following failure — the loss of status, recognition or social belonging — generates a lingering anxiety even in the absence of immediate threat. Sociologist Hugues Lagrange describes it as "derivative fear," a secondary form of fear that drives much of our behavior.

Contemporary markets have been highly attuned to this condition. They offer an expanding range of goods, lifestyles and symbolic experiences that promise reassurance — subtle means of status signaling. Yet markets do not, and cannot, sell fear itself. Instead, they turn to selling what is commonly described as elegance — a term that encompasses a range of market labels such as luxury, premium, refined, high-end and limited edition.

Derived from the Latin roots ex, meaning “out,” and legere, meaning “to gather” or “to choose,” the word elegance originally referred to the act of selecting. Elegance, however, is not just an aesthetic preference. It operates as a social language through which hierarchy is encoded and anxiety is symbolically managed.

Such a function of language is not unique to contemporary consumer societies. During the Joseon era (1392-1910), for example, the "Yangban Culture," representing a distinctive form of elegance, was a socially codified expression of order.

The long, flowing garments worn by the yangban aristocracy, their measured pace of movement and the carefully regulated forms of speech and etiquette did not simply reflect personal taste. Rather, they signaled the economic and social conditions that allowed certain groups to remain relatively distant from manual labor. Elegance was therefore not a lifestyle available to everyone, but a certain rhythm of life made possible by unequal access to time, resources and institutional privilege.

Although formal status systems have gradually weakened in the modern era, the social function of elegance has not disappeared. Instead, it has been reconfigured in new forms, becoming increasingly material rather than spiritual in orientation. Accordingly, across contemporary societies, hierarchical distinction is usually marked less by fixed, inherited titles than by visible patterns of consumption.

It is no longer unusual to see young customers sitting on the pavement at 5 in the morning outside flagship stores. They engage in the act of purchasing not just because the objects themselves are necessities, but because the visibility of consumption is a form of social currency through which identity is expressed. The recent popularity of the slang term "flex," originally meaning "to bend" but now referring chiefly to the display of wealth or expensive possessions, reveals the same underlying dynamic.

Of course, the impulse to distinguish is, in itself, natural. The difficulty begins when it leans disproportionately in one direction and creates not difference, but discrimination. Bearing the personal burden of constructing, displaying and defending their social position, individuals seem increasingly compelled to demonstrate their ability to keep pace with such an “elegant” lifestyle. Beneath these visible performances lies a persistent anxiety — the fear of public humiliation, of being exposed as falling behind in the hierarchy.

Modern individuals, like Sisyphus in the ancient myth, condemned to push a stone endlessly uphill, find themselves engaged in ceaseless acts of distinction. If this impulse cannot simply be weakened, the task may not be to discard the stone, but to redefine what the stone means. When the meaning of a word changes, so do our ways of thinking and acting. Language does not simply describe social structure. It reshapes social reality.

Henri Bergson once wrote about grace, another word often associated with elegance. For him, grace is not imposed from without but generated from within — the immateriality which passes into matter. What, then, might elegance mean if reconsidered through this lens?

The stone we endlessly push uphill might cease to signify elegance and begin to embody grace as the impulse for distinction turns inward rather than outward, toward balance.

We then begin to ask ourselves slightly different questions than before: Does this align with my own rhythm? Does it deplete me, or does it cultivate something within?

Mary Oliver’s home high in the mountains may not be where we are seen, but where we no longer need to be seen, where what rises within us matters more than what lifts us above others. Only now, slowly, am I beginning to sense the home she meant.

Bae Su-kyeong

Bae Su-kyeong is a freelance journalist. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — E