The Lost Art of Etiquette: How Emotional Intelligence & Personal Accountability Are Side Effects of Etiquette & Why That Matters

“Honoring those who have gone before and feeling profound responsibility for those to come.”

There’s a Chinese restaurant in Boerne, Texas, called Shanghai Chinese, where the fluorescent lights cast everything in that particular amber glow that transforms even the most mundane afternoon into something approaching nostalgic. It served as a regular spot for my friends and me during high school, a place where we could escape the suffocating predictability of campus for precisely one hour, order the same familiar dishes that had become as comforting as ritual, and settle into conversations that meandered through the territory that only adolescence can afford to explore without consequence.

One afternoon, we found ourselves seated near the back of the restaurant, eating with the quiet contentment that comes from being exactly where you want to be, when another group of high schoolers burst through the front door like a small tornado of teenage energy. They were loud in every way that demands attention, disruptive in the way that announces itself as deliberate performance, throwing napkins and condiment packets while engaging in a kind of rebellion that felt more like theater than authentic impulse. The entire restaurant seemed to pause, conversations faltering as patrons glanced over with expressions ranging from mild irritation to bemused tolerance.

We watched them, my friends and I, but not necessarily with judgment, at least not the kind of harsh moral condemnation that adults might have applied to the scene. We watched with curiosity. More like anthropologists observing unfamiliar tribes, comparing not our inherent worth to theirs, but the choices we made about how to move through shared spaces. My friends and I were quieter, more attuned to the invisible currents of social awareness that flow through public places. We could enjoy ourselves: laugh until our sides ached, debate with passionate intensity, create our own small bubble of joy, without making someone else’s experience worse in the process. That distinction mattered to us, even then, though we couldn’t have articulated why.

Rebellion, which I’ve come to understand, is both inevitable and necessary. A rite of passage that serves as more than mere noise or disruption. It’s exploration in its rawest form, a way to test the boundaries of selfhood against the expectations of the world. Some people rebel loudly, with grand gestures and public declarations of independence from whatever authority they’ve chosen to reject. Others conduct their rebellion quietly, through sustained reflection, through patient questioning of inherited assumptions, through the deliberate choice to live according to principles they’ve examined and claimed as their own.

Neither approach is inherently superior, because rebellion, when it emerges from honest self-examination rather than mere reactivity, will plant seeds that eventually grow into the qualities we desperately need as adults navigating an increasingly complex world. Qualities like etiquette, empathy, self-respect, confidence, and acceptance. These are not rigid rules imposed from outside, but as living principles that emerge from understanding how we want to be in relationship with others and with ourselves.

Etiquette, properly understood, isn’t the performative adherence to arbitrary social rules designed to maintain class distinctions or enforce conformity. It’s emotional infrastructure, the invisible scaffolding that allows us to move through the world with discernment rather than reaction. It teaches us the invaluable skill of pausing before responding, of creating space between stimulus and action where wisdom can enter. It shows us how to generate harmony rather than discord, how to build bridges rather than walls, how to honor both our own needs and the needs of those around us without sacrificing either.

Etiquette represents one of the cardinal prerequisites for mature human interaction, standing alongside discipline, sustained effort, accountability, and empathy as foundational elements that aren’t merely social conventions but deep roots that shape how we engage with complexity, how we respond to challenge, and how we build relationships capable of withstanding the inevitable pressures that life applies to all human connections.

I grew up during the Clinton and Bush administrations, suspended in that strange generational liminal space between Gen X and the Millennials, technically classified as the latter but feeling perpetually displaced from both tribal identities. The world transformed so rapidly between the late ‘90s and late 2000s that traditional generational cohesion fractured, leaving those of us caught in the transition feeling like cultural refugees, citizens of a country that no longer existed.

My generation invented mainstream cosmopolitan politics, also pioneering the art of remote emotional expression. We lived through the meteoric rise of Myspace, then Facebook, then the proliferation of cell phones that transformed every pocket into a portal to everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Millennials watched the world contract into something smaller and more interconnected, while paradoxically becoming more fragmented; our individual voices amplified to unprecedented volumes while our collective capacity for genuine listening seemed to diminish in inverse proportion.

But we weren’t prepared for the responsibility that came with this new power. We were still in the throes of our own rebellion, still trying to figure out who we were in a world that had shifted beneath our feet while we weren’t paying attention, still grappling with questions of identity and purpose that previous generations had been able to explore at a more leisurely pace.

There was a moment—brief but profound—when the entire world seemed to hold its breath, wondering what social media might do to the fundamental nature of human interaction. Would we lose the ability to connect authentically? Would younger generations grow up never learning the subtle art of face-to-face conversation, the delicate dance of reading body language, and navigating the complex emotional currents that flow between people sharing physical space?

We waited, collectively, for someone else to solve these emerging problems, as if they were technical glitches that could be patched with the right update or philosophical dilemmas that could be resolved through the discovery of some universal truth. In the meantime, while we waited for external salvation, we quietly gave up on ourselves. We stopped holding ourselves to standards that had once seemed automatic, stopped investing in the patient cultivation of qualities that couldn’t be downloaded or instantly acquired.

I struggled during those years—socially, emotionally, financially—caught between worlds, trying to maintain my footing on shifting cultural ground. I attempted to stay accountable to principles that seemed increasingly obsolete, tried to preserve subtle social graces like etiquette that were being discarded not because they had been proven wrong or harmful, but because we had grown resentful of the effort they required and bitter about the lack of immediate, tangible rewards they provided.

I believed in the possibility of meaningful change, and I still do. However, there’s a wrong way to pursue transformation, and we managed to find it with the unerring fidelity of people who mistake motion for progress, who confuse the destruction of old forms with the creation of new ones.

We stopped holding ourselves accountable for our own emotional responses and began accepting only those truths that confirmed our existing worldview. We abandoned the difficult practice of discernment—that patient process of sifting through complexity to find wisdom—and embraced the immediate gratification of reaction. In doing so, we lose something essential, something that can’t be easily replaced or artificially manufactured.

Accountability isn’t merely about taking responsibility for our actions, though it certainly includes that dimension. It’s about emotional stability, about developing the internal strength to recognize that some rules—both written and unwritten—exist not to constrain us but to help us grow into the fullest versions of ourselves. Not all policies are sacred, certainly, and blind obedience to tradition for its own sake represents its own form of intellectual and spiritual poverty. But some traditions carry seeds of wisdom that, when carefully examined and consciously chosen, mature into our finest qualities.

Etiquette, rightly understood, isn’t obedience to arbitrary authority. It’s the cultivation of discernment, the development of that crucial capacity to pause before reacting, to hold space for complexity rather than rushing to judgment, to resist the seductive impulse to reduce other human beings to their political affiliations or their economic circumstances or any other single dimension of their multifaceted existence.

Our freedoms: all of them, from the most basic civil liberties to the subtle freedoms of thought and expression that make civilization possible, are more fragile than we like to acknowledge. They always have been. When we forget this fragility, when we begin to take liberty for granted, we inevitably start blaming that fragility on people or ideas we oppose rather than recognizing our shared responsibility for protecting and nurturing the conditions that make freedom possible.

But the truth, as always, is more complicated than our partisan simplifications would suggest. The truth lives in nuance, in the patient recognition that most human situations contain elements of multiple competing truths, in the humble acknowledgment that our individual perspectives, however passionately held, represent only partial glimpses of larger realities.

There’s a profound difference between revering freedom and feeling entitled to it, between owning your truth and weaponizing it against others, between standing firmly in your principles and using those principles as clubs to beat down anyone who sees the world differently. Etiquette, properly practiced, helps us navigate these crucial distinctions. It serves not merely as a precondition for mutual respect, but as a filter through which we can shape our responses to create connection rather than conflict, understanding rather than division.

Emotional intelligence can’t be taught in the traditional sense; it can’t be downloaded through a workshop or acquired by memorizing a set of techniques. However, emotional intelligence can be nurtured through conscious behavior, attention to the unwritten codes that govern human interaction, and the patient cultivation of small acts that might seem insignificant in isolation but accumulate over time into something approaching wisdom.

These gestures—holding the door open not for recognition but to acknowledge our shared humanity, saying “thank you” not because someone has performed a service but because their existence contributes something valuable to the world, listening not to formulate our response but to genuinely understand what someone else is trying to communicate—build emotional muscle. They create pathways in the brain and heart that make compassion more automatic, empathy more natural, and connection more possible.

You can’t shame someone into emotional intelligence. You can’t cancel them into it, or judge them into it, or lecture them into it. And you certainly can’t claim emotional intelligence for yourself while practicing cruelty toward others, regardless of how righteous that cruelty might feel in the moment. To practice authentic etiquette is to reflect genuine self-respect, and you can’t have one without the other. They’re different facets of the same fundamental commitment to treating yourself and others as inherently worthy of care and consideration.

Emotionally intelligent people aren’t arrogant or performative in their wisdom. We don’t make grand gestures or demand recognition for our emotional sophistication. We’re steady in our responses, present in our attention, and reliable in our care. We’re the ones you want as spouses when life gets complicated, as parents when children need consistent guidance, as siblings when families face crisis, as friends when support matters more than entertainment. Not because we’re perfect, but because we’ve done the patient work of cultivating the prerequisites for a mature relationship.

We’ve learned through experience that hate, regardless of how righteous it feels, regardless of how justified our reasons might seem, still begets more hate. Nature doesn’t distinguish between noble hatred and ignoble hatred—it simply responds to the energy we put into the world with more of the same. Whatever reason you might have for dismissing etiquette as archaic or meaningless, whatever intellectual justification you’ve constructed for abandoning the patient cultivation of courtesy, it’s worth reconsidering.

Because in our rush to liberate ourselves from inherited forms, we’re sacrificing the very qualities that make compassion possible. In their place, we’ve elevated resentment and indifference to virtues, as if anger and apathy were the hallmarks of enlightenment rather than symptoms of our collective spiritual poverty. But these aren’t the right prerequisites for genuine freedom, or authentic truth, or meaningful art.

Accountability is. Sustained effort is. Empathy is.

Cultivating these cardinal prerequisites isn’t about nostalgic reverence for tradition or blind submission to inherited authority. It’s about creating balance in our internal and external worlds. It’s about developing genuine emotional intelligence rather than its performance. It’s about participating in the creation of a culture that knows how to pause before reacting, how to listen before speaking, and how to respond with care rather than merely reacting impulsively.

Let’s revive etiquette, not as a form of social obedience designed to maintain existing power structures, but as a conscious choice to honor both those who came before us and those still to come. Not every tradition deserves preservation. Some customs are indeed empty shells that once contained wisdom but now serve only to perpetuate inequality or limit human flourishing. But tradition as a whole isn’t sacred, and it’s not empty either.

The task before us is to shake it loose, carefully, to sift through inherited wisdom with the patience of prospectors searching for gold, recognizing that scattered throughout the accumulated customs of human civilization are flakes of genuine insight, practices that have endured because they serve essential human needs, ways of being that are worth preserving and passing forward.

They’re worth holding onto, these small courtesies and patient practices, these quiet gestures of mutual recognition and care. Not because they make us superior to those who choose different paths, but because they make us more fully ourselves, more capable of the kind of authentic connection that makes life worth living, more able to contribute to the healing our world so desperately needs.