Chapter 4 – Machine-made Men opens with a moment both humorous and frustrating: a personal-looking letter turns out to be nothing more than a printed pitch for suspenders and disposable collars. That small deception sparks a larger reflection on how daily life has been taken over by a flood of inventions, most of them unnecessary. These gadgets, born from a culture addicted to novelty, promise efficiency but deliver only confusion. Instead of simplifying life, they overcomplicate it with moving parts, hidden clips, and instructions thicker than the devices themselves. Americans, it seems, are no longer people dressed with care but mechanical figures wrapped in contraptions. The charm of personal style is lost to functionality, and comfort is a secondary concern to patentable complexity.

The narrator paints an almost slapstick vision of the modern man, who must now navigate the maze of mechanized fashion before he can even leave the house. From shirts that button up the back to undergarments with elastic “health-improving” straps, nothing is intuitive anymore. Dressing becomes an ordeal, where failing to understand your clothing might mean being locked in it or damaging some delicate clasp. On a train ride, fellow passengers are observed as walking catalogues of invention—each of them carrying patent-labeled items, bulging with unnecessary features. These devices are worn like badges of progress, even though they do little to enhance dignity or ease. The absurdity lies not in their existence, but in how uncritically they are embraced. One sees in these men not individuality, but uniform complication.

Even more troubling is how these inventions parade themselves as solutions to ailments real and imagined. A certain kind of suspenders promises improved digestion, while a collar button claims to align posture and blood flow. Whether or not these claims hold truth, their sheer boldness is startling. Men are no longer content to wear clothing—they must now wear devices disguised as clothing. Salesmen touting such gear speak with rehearsed confidence, spouting phrases like “health innovation” and “time-saving elegance,” all while pushing products that baffle more than benefit. The narrator listens, skeptical, as he’s introduced to a shirt front printed with sonnets and a tie that attaches with a patented magnetic snap. Beneath the sales pitch lies the same old goal: profit dressed in progress.

At its heart, the satire targets a society so obsessed with speed and novelty that it no longer stops to ask if a change is worthwhile. The modern man, weighed down by his accessories, often appears more like a clumsy experiment than a finished product. The very tools designed to free him only tighten the grip of worry—worry over malfunction, lost parts, or simply the embarrassment of being unable to dress oneself without a manual. True elegance, the chapter suggests, doesn’t require constant improvement. It stems from simplicity, confidence, and a kind of quiet clarity. Yet in this age of mechanized fashion, quiet clarity has been lost to the roar of small, overcomplicated inventions.

The future imagined is both comic and sad. The narrator envisions archaeologists of a distant era uncovering remnants of this gadget-filled wardrobe and scratching their heads at its oddities. What will they make of the dual-function cuff link that also dispensed cologne? Or the adjustable cravat modeled after a tourniquet? These discoveries, intended to display ingenuity, may instead appear as desperate signs of a society so tangled in its own cleverness that it forgot how to be human. The mechanical layers might be admired, but the purpose—the need to invent so much for so little—may be questioned. We marvel at Roman aqueducts and Greek amphorae, but who will marvel at a self-folding pocket square?

In its closing notes, the chapter returns to irony. The more we automate life, the more tangled it becomes. A man cannot simply put on a shirt; he must troubleshoot it. A button is no longer a circle—it is a system. And with each new device, we drift further from effortlessness, burying ourselves in the very machinery meant to liberate us. The narrator leaves readers with a quiet warning: not every solution needs a patent, and not every improvement is progress. Sometimes, the most modern choice is to choose less.