Reference reading
Vanity
Making the appearance of a good shared life more important than the life being shared.
Excessive dependence on admiration and the appearance of importance.
Imagine this: A host arranges an immaculate dinner photograph, moving the guests’ plates out of reach so that their own place setting fills the picture.
How the pattern works
An attractive table and a photograph can both be innocent pleasures. Vanity changes what they are for. The guests become material for an admired image of the host; their actual experience is allowed to deteriorate so that the picture of hospitality can improve.
Approval can also shape what remains unseen: an awkward conversation postponed until company leaves, an unmanageable purchase made for appearances, or a family member asked to perform happiness. The attractive account becomes something the shared life is expected to serve.
What it costs a shared life
People may feel that their presence is welcome chiefly when it supports the desired impression. Useful care competes with visible display, and a private difficulty becomes harder to discuss because admitting it would spoil the picture. The host can acquire compliments while missing the company they invited.
A distinction worth keeping
Enjoyment of beauty, recognition and sharing a happy occasion is not automatically Vanity. The issue is excessive dependence on admiration. Arrogance inflates one’s importance or judgment; Vanity may depend intensely on other people’s opinion while privately remaining uncertain. A public image is not evidence of the quality of a private relationship.
What a useful response can change
Ask what the occasion is meant to give the people present. Arrange the photograph around that purpose rather than treating their comfort as an obstacle to it.
Permit an accurate smaller account: a modest meal, a changed plan or an unfinished room. Presentation need not conceal limitations to be thoughtful.
Offer acknowledgment to contributions that do not appear in the picture. Notice who cooked, cleaned, adjusted their time or made the visit possible.
Questions for reflection
- What am I asking others to perform for the audience?
- What would I still care about if the occasion were never shown?
Other perspectives
Mandeville, the most methodical of those two authors, considers whatever is done from a sense of propriety, from a regard to what is commendable and praise-worthy, as being done from a love of praise and commendation, or as he calls it from vanity.
Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source
Smith reports Mandeville’s tendency to explain praise-worthy conduct as vanity and goes on to criticize that reduction. Wanting acknowledgment does not establish the excessive dependence on admiration examined here.
Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity to what we would have others think of us.
Jane Austen · Pride and Prejudice · Read the source
Mary Bennet gives this distinction in Austen’s novel; it is character dialogue, not a scientific classification. It nevertheless offers a useful comparison between one’s own estimate and the opinion one wants from an audience.