Whatever we do is marinated in routine. You wake up, brew a coffee with one teaspoon of sugar and half a second of milk, and read the paper. You get in the car, look in the rear-view mirror, brush off a speckle of imaginary dandruff from your lapels and first-gear in traffic. After work, you settle down to read in your favourite armchair, moistened finger at the ready to turn the page. And after you’ve had your fill of metaphors and similes, you nib a dog-ear on a left-sided page.

Everything is routine. It’s like a reassuring pat on the shoulder that yes, the universe is conspiring in your favour and yes, you can do it.

Take this sentence, for instance. It’s the answer to a rigid crossword of preparation. First I turned the heat up and meditated for 10 minutes. Then I put on my old cashmere sweatpants and went to the closet to choose my slippers. Not much of a choice really: I only have 12 pairs. But which shall it be: the old House of Hounds in blue suede or, since it’s Sunday, the velvet Church’s which grandma gave me last Christmas? Such is the conundrum that I message Andrew: to you, Andrew D. Luecke, style editor at Esquire. However, by the time he answers, I’m already enjoying a humble dinner of Wagyu burger with foie gras sauce.

The previous paragraph is, of course, not true. However, it’s a prime example of humblebragging. Added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2014, humblebragging is when someone, either unconsciously or, in most cases, very consciously, shows off about something while trying to pass it off as humble self-deprecation. It’s like going in for a job interview and, when one of the interviewers asks you what your biggest defect is, you answer: “Oh, being a perfectionist.”

There are those who spend their days streaming a life of false humilities: how a celebrity is in their living room, right now, watching telly, or how tired they feel after doing 1,000 push-ups

Status updates and tweets have become the medium of choice for humblebraggers, allowing them to share their humble achievements with thousands. Celebrities tend to be the worst offenders. How humble of them to tell us simple people how nippy it was at the Dolby Theatre: thankfully the Oscar nomination kept them warm. Not to mention the endless stream of photos showing celebrities wearing no make-up and “some old thing” but still looking gorgeous.

But it’s not just celebrities that are prone to a bout of humblebragging: we all are. There are those who spend their days streaming a life of false humilities: how a celebrity is in their living room, right now, watching telly, or how tired they feel after doing 1,000 push-ups.

And let’s be honest here: even the more modest of us can give in to the temptation of name-dropping or telling others how delicious our carbonara is, even though it only took us five minutes and not much effort to cook.

But what is at the root of humblebragging? At surface level, humblebragging is about boosting your most valuable brand: you. It’s plain and simple narcissism thinly disguised with a sheen of woe-is-me self-deprecation. Now having a modicum of self-esteem is healthy. However, to hold a high opinion of ourselves is plain wrong: the world would be a happier place if we all acknowledged our failures.

At a deeper level, there could be a hint of low self-esteem, especially if the bragging bit doesn’t have any solid foundations. Can people feel so vulnerable that they have to brag about a false life and show off a virtue they don’t possess?

However, let’s not over-interpret. If someone updates their status with, “I’ve just woken up”, it could either mean that they are lazy good-for-nothings or else that they can afford to wake up at 10 in the morning while we have to go to work.

But the question here is why did they feel the need to tell others that they have woken up? Why does something so mundane deserve an audience?

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