This is how we live now. A life where even the figurativeness of metaphor and cliché have to be actualised, in a world where what we can imagine can never be enough. It's no longer enough to imagine watching paint dry as that mythical thing which would be more fulfilling than whatever it is we're doing when we imagine it.

We've got to see it. To do it. If it's not there in front of us, the idiom actualised, it's not worth talking about. Have our imaginations been swept clean, checked, reloaded, taxi-ed along the runway of our life of moving pictures, and flown away?

I'm in a seafront café as I write this. From my seat by the window I can see two fishing boats, becalmed on tarmac for the winter, beyond the intensifying stream of passing traffic. It's sunny outside, and cold. A man in Armani jeans and burnished boat shoes is smiling in resignation at his wife, who's dressed in Ugg boots and North Face puffa coat.

Their children are stamping and crying because, now that they've had buns and mixed berry Five Alive, they can't have ice creams too. It's a typical seaside scene – with warmer clothes. A woman in a zebra-print coat comes in, returning her tray after her al fresco Americano, her red patent bag hooked neatly over her arm.

A slim, elegant young woman, all in black apart from a dark red cashmere scarf, walks past, straight-backed, on her way to the opposite corner, adjusting a bag with a discreet Prada logo, and sliding her dark glasses onto her head in a practised move. It's all so perfect. I feel scruffy, inadequate and, thankfully, invisible in my corner. As an embodied idiom I'd be "out of sight, out of mind". At coffee time on the kind of Sunday morning which seems to be stylishness personified, have we all become defined by our labels, our habits and our appearances, just as much as the epitome of boredom on that well-known website?

It's more and more obvious that it's not just enough to have a life. To be here. To exist. You have to have a lifestyle too – and it has to be worthy of inclusion in a Sunday colour supplement. The lifestyle tribes are in the café and in our workplaces and all around us on the roads and in the shops and at the gym and the pub and the wine bar, and just about everywhere else we go. They have their own languages and labels and aspirations. Suddenly, for instance, staying in on a Friday night isn't middle-aged and boring any more. It becomes "the new going out" and gets an authorial translation into words like "nesting" or "cocooning".

Even watching TV becomes stylishly acceptable – but only if it's certain programmes or channels, or if it's just a little bit ironic, or if it's on a black-toned HD flatscreen. There's fast food and slow food and taste the difference food and finest food: this is not just food, this is lifestyle food. And, depending on who it is you aspire to be, it's suddenly incredibly adorable to raid the fridge in the middle of the night to gorge on chocolate cake or rip some extra meat from a cooling carcass.

The fastidiousness of a world governed by that hygienic triumvirate, Mr Muscle, Mr Sheen and Mr Cillit Bang, is sidelined in a visceral sensuousness of kneading and ripping and tearing and luxuriating when it comes to food. The monotonous "here we are again" ritual of static, routine mealtimes suddenly assumes the idealised mantle of pseudo-Mediterranean family one-ness in a ludicrous parody of the Dolmio ads – about as authentically Italian as the bizarre pidgin English of their muppet-like stuffed characters.

And the pattern is perpetuated when we leave the house. We label ourselves with how we dress – with how we do our hair – with everything. There's the sensibly co-ordinated his-and-her Next couples, all averagely-cut jeans and precision-matched tops and anonymous, inoffensive accessories. There's the Top Shop brigade and the sports brigade and I suppose I'd better give the outdoorsy, red-cheeked fleece wearers a mention as they bring out their Brasher boots and their Berghaus coats and their Thinsulate hats for another winter or practicality and comfort and avoiding catching cold.

There's the cheery spots and stripes of the Boden catalogue crowd, with their mini-me children and their married-me partners. Even their complacent expressions match. Then of course there are the "label fans" – a definite victory for style over substance, these people stalk the streets in a sartorial embodiment of confidence. They make me feel small and insignificant, not least because I know that, in shoes like that, I'd fall over.

And of course there's the cars we drive. In my indifferently-clean Golf, I know that, behind and before and around me in the traffic, are those people who devote hours to perfecting the vehicles which transport them every day from ordinariness to credibility. There's the MPVs and mini MPVs of proud parenthood and the 4X4s of the Dads who dream of life beyond the road.

The superminis of independent singledom or empty-nested ageing, the sensible hatchbacks of early middle-age. The estate cars and saloons of established and executive success. And then they come, racing past me, overtaking me – the prestige makes and the personalised plates and the success and the prestige writ-large in the coded messages of initials and birthdays and business. You know you've arrived, I suppose, when you can announce yourself to everyone as you get there.

They say, in the Style magazines from which we get the readings and embodiments of lifestyle nowadays, that individual, "bespoke" fragrance is the ultimate "thing to have" this Christmas. A perfume which is unique to you - made for you by an expert in the expensive, personal equivalent of those increasing phalanxes of celebrity scents amassing like a vanilla-heavy army on the perfume counters of Boots and Debenhams. Why have Jade or Celine Dion or SJP or Britney when you can have - well - you? It sums it up, I think. In a world of lifestyle and labels and the visual possibilities which turn the figuratives of "watching paint dry" into a literal "virtual reality", to turn yourself into your very own designer label makes a complete, if slightly bizarre, kind of sense. We define ourselves by our styles and our labels and our lifestyles. As we do this, we see the unseeable, and define that indefinable thing - exactly who we are or what we're like - in some sort of mini advertising campaign of packaging ourselves for one another's eyes.

If the greatness of our individuality and our lifestyle and our aspirations can be packaged with its own, individually unique fragrance, then we really must be doing something right. And if the greatness of our individuality and our lifestyle and our aspirations can be packaged with its own, individually unique fragrance, then we really must be doing something right. The scent of success becomes every bit as tangible as the YouTube drying paint - and even at well over £100 a bottle, surely it's worth paying that bit extra just to be, uniquely, you?

As the figurative half-truth of metaphor becomes something real and concrete, as the Sunday morning lattes and Americanos and machiattos are consumed, as the shiny cars with the coded licence plates drive past - as all these defining lifestyle moments surround us, the girl with the Prada handbag draws a Blackberry from one pocket and an iPhone from the other and steps outside the seafront café to text with one hand and talk to someone from the other. As all these things happen and accelerate and define our passing hours, the speed of the drying paint speeds up, slows down, as the sun fades on the horizon and the clouds gather for an afternoon of promised rain.

The weekend ends and we define ourselves as workers yet again. As the months move onwards, the desired effects of colour supplement advice change like a chameleon, and we follow its tones like slaves. In the Sunday morning cafés, it's hard to know whether to read the magazines or to watch as their pictures come to life on either side. We make ourselves unique, yet make ourselves the same as everybody else in doing so. As the seasons pass we follow and comply, nodding to trends and limited collections, and adjusting our "signature looks" and being told "that's very you". We announce our presence in a visible synaesthesia of colour and scent and engine noise and texture and flavour. Our labels are our signifiers in a huge decoding game of guess who?

The cycle continues. The paint continues to dry in the ever-refreshing image of our lives.

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