Fashion Brief
Mark Zuckerberg’s brain is a mega-processor that constantly operates at full tilt. He is perennially, dizzyingly consumed with Facebook. He lies awake at night, fizzing and whirring with ideas about how to fully maximise the Facebook experience. “What’s the best way to let everyone know exactly how racist all their old schoolmates have got?” he thinks. “How can I make the average Facebook visit as annoying and unwieldy as physically possible? How many pointless hoops can I reasonably expect my users to joylessly clamber through in order to retain a basic veneer of privacy? Ten? Fifty? A million?” This is the high-frequency attention to detail that makes Mark Zuckerberg one of the most powerful men on the planet.
But it comes at a terrible cost. Zuckerberg’s mind is so busy maxing out with new ways to cram your timeline with irritating Candy Crush life requests that he’s forgotten how to wear clothes properly. Whenever you see Mark Zuckerberg in public, chances are he’ll be decked out in a grey T-shirt, possibly offset with a black hoodie if he’s unable to warm himself with the fury of his exasperated users.
His lack of sartorial variety hasn’t gone unnoticed, either. At a Facebook “town hall” meeting last week, Zuckerberg answered a question about his limited wardrobe by claiming that he simply lacks the time and energy to pick a new outfit every day. “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve the community,” he said.
This is a tactic that’s long been used by influential megalomaniacs. Steve Jobs could focus all his attention on Apple, for instance, because he always dressed up like a French mime artist. Barack Obama owns so many identical suits that whenever he goes off-grid with something in a nice shade of tan, the internet immediately starts spasming with hysterically surprised mockery. American TV presenter Ryan Seacrest has even launched a modular clothing line, numerically coded by colour, for men too powerful to worry about the social alienation that comes with the knowledge that they’re being dressed by the man who executive produces all the Kardashian shows.
Why do they do this? To stave off decision fatigue, a real condition where you become overloaded with so many pointless decisions that your productivity ends up falling off a cliff. You spend so long wasting precious mental energy on frivolous distractions – such as what to wear or what to eat – that you stop being able to do your job properly. You become paralysed with choice. You start making bad decisions and exercising poor self-control until you end up being booed out of your own boardroom by a gaggle of elderly puce-faced stockholders.
And, by the look of it, limiting your sartorial peripheries actually works – Barack Obama has pared his wardrobe down to such a degree that he can confidently walk into any situation and make decisions that directly impact on the future of mankind. Meanwhile, Louis Walsh owns dozens of different suits and can’t even decide which dismal knock-kneed X Factor contestant to send home each week, even though that’s literally his only job and nobody even cares about it anyway. Faced with evidence as watertight as this, perhaps we should all start following Zuckerberg’s lead.
In fact, in retrospect, I think I might already do this. Sure, an outsider might see my insistence on shuffling around my house in a manky dressing gown all day as a sign that I suffer from dangerously low self-esteem, but really it’s just because I’m saving all my cerebral energy for my work. Similarly, I’ve come to realise that I no longer have the spare mental energy necessary to shave or wash. Do I use long strokes or short? Do I use the Gillette razor or the Wilkinson Sword? Do I rub a flannel on my face first, or do I rub it on my bum? Maybe this is why I eat Weetabix for about 60% of my meals, too. It’s not because I’m so ashamed of being undressed and unwashed that I can’t even bring myself to go to the supermarket and buy real food. It’s because I’m just like a powerful CEO. It works!
Reducing unnecessary decisions is such a good idea that I might even take it one step further. Instead of booking a holiday next year, I might just let a travel agent drive me around in a coach for a couple of days. Look, there’s France. Look, there’s Germany. It’s lunchtime, so here’s a binbag full of porridge. At 10pm they’ll come around and physically close your eyes for you, and then shout numbers at you in your sleep so you can dream about maths.
Mark Zuckerberg, if you’re reading, come on holiday with me. We can do this together, dressed identically and being spoon-fed by poorly paid underlings who obviously resent doing our donkey work. We’ll have so much fun. But not enough fun for you to ignore your plans to pointlessly spread the mobile Facebook experience out across 20 different but equally unnecessary apps. Priorities first!
