Walk through any airport today and you’ll see pajama bottoms, sweatpants, and slippers.  And it’s not just younger travelers.  It seems as if comfort has become the default uniform of public life in America

That’s not to suggest we return to the 1940s and ’50s, when men wore suits to the ballpark and women dressed to shop.  But there was something interesting about that era.  People didn’t just go somewhere—they prepared to be seen there.  Air travel, in particular, felt like an occasion, rather than the inconvenience it is today.

Dress was never just about clothing; it was the instinct to adjust oneself to the moment.  Different settings carried different expectations—not rigid rules per se, but a tacit understanding that how you showed up mattered.  But over time, that social compact has given way to informality, comfort, and what can fairly be called the pajama culture.

But this shift didn’t happen without a reason.  Social barriers have lowered and many of the old dress codes reflected class distinctions and relaxing them has made society more open and accessible and while that’s certainly progress, something has been lost in the exchange.

Research suggests clothing is not neutral. In a widely cited 2012 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky found that participants wearing a lab coat described as a doctor’s coat performed better on attention-related tasks than those wearing the same coat labeled as a painter’s smock.

I remember buying a suit many years ago and the salesclerk’s pitch was, “Clothes make the man.”  Well, he was almost right, clothes just created the mindset.  Follow-on research has shown that more formal attire is associated with higher-level, abstract thinking, while casual clothing tends to anchor people in the more mundane.

That helps explain why uniformity of dress is central in the military.  Uniforms eliminate ambiguity. They signal role, authority, and expectation instantly.  More important, they create a psychological shift.  When the uniform goes on, the individual steps into a defined role governed by standards, discipline, and purpose.

That level of conformity doesn’t belong in civilian life—and why should it?  Our society is about individuality. But the underlying principle still applies and presentation acts as a cue.  It tells us what kind of environment we are in and how we are expected to behave.  When those cues fade, behavior follows.

We see it in our language, and we see it in the workplace, where dress codes have evolved from casual Fridays to Polo shirts and shorts.  We also see it in public behavior—loud phone calls, diminished awareness of shared space, and a growing sense that individual preference overrides situational context.

Each of these changes, on its own, is not significant.  But together, they represent something larger: a shift away from external standards toward internal preference as the primary guide for behavior.

There are benefits to that shift.  A more casual culture is frequently a more open one.  It reduces barriers and allows people to participate without navigating unspoken rules.  It can also foster creativity but there is a cost.

Shared standards—whether in dress, language, or behavior—serve as a kind of social shorthand. They reduce ambiguity. They signal respect for the setting and for others.  They create a baseline of expectation that makes public life more predictable and cohesive.  When those standards erode, clarity erodes with them.

The issue isn’t that people are wearing pajamas in airports.  The issue is that the instinct to ask, What does this moment require? is fading.

We know that instinct still exists, because we see it when it matters most.  No one shows up to a funeral or a wedding in pajamas.  Not because there’s a written rule, but because the moment itself demands something more.  The setting calls for respect, restraint, and awareness of others—and we instinctively respond.

The question is what happens when that instinct is reserved only for the most important occasions—and disappears everywhere else.

Not all moments are the same.  Some call for seriousness.  Some for restraint.  Some for a recognition that we are part of something larger than ourselves.  A culture that treats all moments as interchangeable risks losing the ability to distinguish between them.

When people stop dressing up they also stop adjusting themselves to the moment.  And when a culture loses that instinct, it doesn’t just become more comfortable.  It becomes less aware of what the moment requires.

That doesn’t mean we should return to suits at the ballpark or formal wear at 30,000 feet.  Culture evolves.  But it does suggest that something worth preserving has been set aside.  Discipline, at its core, is not about rules imposed from the outside.  It is about standards chosen from within—the decision to meet a moment with intention rather than default to ease.

For a long time, dress helped reinforce that instinct.  Perhaps not perfectly, but it was effective.  Today many of those cues are disappearing and that’s a loss is worth noticing.