The crowd in his head

A young man in Manama needs a car. The sensible one is second-hand, small and a few years old, and it would leave him with money in the bank. He keeps looking at the big new one instead.

Ask him why and he will talk about what people will think. His cousins. The friends from university. The colleagues who will see it in the car park.

The pressure is real in the sense that he feels it. It shapes what he buys, as it shapes what people study, where they live and what they wear. But it is worth asking where it comes from.

Mostly, it comes from inside. The cousins have their own loans to worry about. The friends from university are thinking about their own cars, if they are thinking about cars at all. The colleagues will glance at whatever he parks, once, and never again. Many of the people he is performing for would not notice if he arrived on foot. Some of them barely know he exists.

The audience is imagined, and imagining it is convenient. It spares him the harder work of deciding what he actually wants. If everyone is watching, the choice is already made: buy what the watchers would approve of.

It feels like bending to other people. It is really a shortcut he has drawn for himself, and called it pressure so that he would not have to choose.