This world of sociability, the only one in which a democracy of equals is possible without friction, is an artificial world, made up of beings who have renounced both the objective and the purely personal features of the intensity and extensiveness of life in order to bring about among themselves a pure interaction, free of any disturbing material accent. If we now have the conception that we enter into sociability purely as "human beings," as that which we really are, lacking all the burdens, the agitations, the inequalities with which real life disturbs the purity of our picture, it is because modern life is overburdened with objective content and material demands. Ridding ourselves of this burden in sociable circles, we believe we return to our natural-personal being and overlook the fact that this personal aspect also does not consist in its full uniqueness and natural completeness, but only in a certain reserve and stylizing of the sociable man.

DEFINE: Simmel reframes sociability not as natural authenticity but as a stylized, reserved performance—an artificial reserve rather than a return to true personhood.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 378