Some people, by virtue of the work they do, accumulate wisdom from which we could all benefit. If you want to know about the costs and rewards of compassion, ask a nurse; to understand resilience, ask a deep-sea trawlerman. I have to confess, however, that I've never thought this way about advertising executives. It's not that I don't think your average fashionably spectacled creative doesn't have something to teach us. It's just that that something almost certainly has to do with which massively overrated Terence Conran restaurant stocks the best Pouilly Fumé, or why exploding multicoloured paint over a council estate will make people buy TVs. Arrogantly, I tend to presume these are lessons I can manage without.
Apparently I was mistaken. Life's A Pitch, a new self-help book by advertising expert Roger Mavity and design guru Stephen Bayley, argues that the whole of life is like working in advertising. They take this as a cause for excitement, not deep depression. The book is based on the stress-inducing premise that our lives hinge on crucial moments - a first date, the initial spark of friendship - when we must perform at our best. Such moments are like "pitch[ing] to Guinness for their advertising account". There are several reasons why I'll never go on a first date with Mavity, but now I have a new one: I'd be all too aware that he'd have spent the night before brainstorming his ideas, possibly using "mind maps" to facilitate his blue-sky thinking.
The concept of the "presentation of self" as a way of understanding human behaviour goes back to the psychologist Erving Goffman. But the idea that presentation is self - that our lives are nothing more than how we come across - is more recent, and more alarming. It surfaced in the 90s with Tom Peters, who invented the label "Brand You". "Starting today, you are a brand," he wrote. "You're every bit as much a brand as Coke ... What is it that my product or service does that makes it different? [If] your answer wouldn't light up the eyes of a prospective client ... you've got a big problem." This is good advice in the workplace, which was as far as Peters took it - unlike Mavity and Bayley. "If it's true that we're always on trial at work," they argue, "it's even more true in our lives outside work."
It's obvious that a date will go better if you're well-dressed and clean than if you're scruffy and smell of rotten eggs. (Or so I've found.) The problem isn't that presentation doesn't matter, or that social life isn't partly about power. It's just that constantly thinking about self-presentation, and what you're trying to gain, won't help. It'll either paralyse you or force you to see every interaction as a win-lose situation, like pitching for an account. The book's blurb promises to "help you win life's battles", and the metaphor is telling. This is life as war, albeit one fought over long lunches. It's an exhausting way to live.
At the risk of sounding like some terrible, long-haired peacenik who'd never get a look-in at the Guinness account, does it always have to be about fighting?
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
