Discretion is often imagined as an effort, something a person has to keep up, a guard that must be held in place. Understood that way it sounds tiring, and a little joyless. In practice, the people who manage it best do not experience it as effort at all. For them it has become a habit.

The difference matters. An effort is something one does and then, inevitably, stops doing. A habit simply runs in the background, requiring no particular attention. Discretion that depends on constant vigilance will lapse, because vigilance always lapses. Discretion that has become a settled way of doing things does not.

This is mostly a matter of arrangement rather than willpower. When a person's affairs are set up sensibly from the start, when the routine details of life are not casually exposed, when the people and institutions around them understand how things are handled, discretion stops being something one has to remember. It is built into how matters are already done.

It also tends to be quiet. Real discretion rarely announces itself. It is not the same as appearing mysterious, or being difficult to deal with. It is simply that the ordinary business of a life is conducted without leaving more of a trace than it needs to.

The pleasant consequence is that a person stops having to think about it. They are not managing their privacy from one moment to the next, because the managing was done once, properly, and now looks after itself.

Discretion, at its best, is unremarkable. It is not a performance and not a strain. It is a sensible habit, kept quietly, that leaves a person free to think about other things.