A trap or a starting point?

My wife and I spent a few months traveling Europe in our van in 2024. We had one mirror on board, small and retractable, and it barely got used. I’d flip it down to shave or put in my contacts, maybe twice a month. My wife used it even less.

I rarely thought about my appearance during that time. Between writing, working, hiking, upgrading the van and taking photos, my attention was usually somewhere else.

I’d think about a sentence I couldn’t get right, or the light on a trail I wanted to capture before it disappeared. I’d think about a client’s project or a strange noise coming from the engine. Some mornings, I woke up and had no idea what I looked like, and it didn’t cross my mind to check.

That’s what happens when you stop looking at yourself. Your attention doesn’t disappear. It just goes somewhere else.

The striking part is when we went back into a regular house.

Whenever we stayed with family or traveled without the van, we were suddenly surrounded by mirrors again. In the bathroom, the bedroom, the elevator, hotel lobbies and shopping malls. Within hours, I noticed myself looking into them without even realizing it.

Nothing about me had changed.

Only my environment had.

Every time that happened, I thought of something Fernando Pessoa once wrote.

“Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face. There’s nothing more sinister. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.”

The first time I read those words, they sounded ridiculous.

Now I’m not so sure.

Michael Jackson had a different read on the same object. “Man in the Mirror” was reportedly his favorite of his own songs, and its argument is the opposite of Pessoa’s. Look at your reflection not to admire it, but to change what needs changing. The man in the mirror isn’t just an image. He’s the one you’re accountable to.

Both men were talking about the same glass. One saw a trap. The other saw a starting point.

Vanity didn’t begin with the mirror. Humans have always cared about beauty and compared themselves to one another.

But the mirror changed our relationship with ourselves.

Before mirrors became common, the closest thing people had to a reflection was still water. Lakes, ponds and quiet rivers occasionally revealed a face looking back. The experience was fleeting. A ripple or a gust of wind was enough to erase it.

Even today, that’s usually how I see myself while hiking. Sometimes my reflection appears in a calm lake or a stream. I notice it for a second, then keep walking.

Water reflects.

It doesn’t invite inspection.

The mirror does.

For the first time, people could study themselves whenever they wanted. Every wrinkle, every expression and every imperfection became something to examine. Our face slowly stopped being something other people recognized and became something we managed.

Then the mirror evolved.

Today, it fits inside our pockets.

Every smartphone is a portable mirror. Every front-facing camera gives us another opportunity to check ourselves. Social media takes it one step further. It doesn’t simply encourage us to look at ourselves. It encourages us to compare ourselves.

The question quietly changes.

Not what am I doing?

But how do I look doing it?

Experiences become performances.

A meal becomes a photograph before it becomes lunch.

A mountain becomes a backdrop before it becomes a destination.

A sunset becomes content before it becomes a memory.

The image slowly replaces the experience.

The myth of Narcissus wasn’t really about self-love. It was about confusing reality with its reflection.

Perhaps we’ve built an entire culture around that confusion.

Capitalism couldn’t have asked for a better invention than the smartphone. A device that constantly reminds people they are incomplete is also a device that constantly sells solutions.

You don’t like your skin? Buy this.

Your clothes? Replace them.

Your face? Filter it.

Your life? Compare it to someone else’s until it feels inadequate.

The reflection no longer shows who we are. It tells us who we should become. We look to it for answers, but all it gives us back is a question.

I don’t think mirrors are the enemy. They help us shave, treat a cut or make sure there’s nothing in our teeth. Like every tool, they have a purpose.

The problem begins when they stop serving us and begin shaping us.

Living in the van hadn’t made me immune to vanity. It had simply removed thousands of small reminders to think about myself.

Returning to a conventional home reminds me how unusual that has become.

Modern life is designed to redirect our attention back toward ourselves. Not just through mirrors, but through advertisements, cameras, screens and algorithms that constantly ask the same question:

How do you look?

Far fewer things ask a more important one.

What are you paying attention to?

Maybe that’s why nature feels so restorative.

The forest doesn’t care what I’m wearing.

The mountains aren’t impressed by beauty.

A lake reflects my face for a moment before the wind carries it away.

Nature never asks me to perform.

It simply asks me to be present.

That’s the gift a mirror can’t give.

Pessoa was probably exaggerating.

The inventor of the mirror didn’t poison the human heart.

But he may have started a process that eventually led us here.

A civilization that spends more time looking at itself than at the world eventually mistakes appearance for reality.

Teekay