Pretty

I got to thinking about how people get hung up on attractiveness and how insecure that makes us. There's this idea that life would be better if only we were prettier or richer or dressed better. People spend an unbelievable amount of money every year to make themselves more attractive. Hair color, diet products, makeup, plastic surgery, clothes, fake tanning, hair plugs, teeth bleaching, and on and on and on. 

How did we get this way? How did we get to a place where we think our value as human beings depends on being attractive? We're so obsessed with the outward appearance that we forget to develop as people and never think we're good enough. Like being attractive would make up for all of our personal shortcomings both real and imagined and life would magically become easier for us. When did we get so shallow and insecure about ourselves?

I never thought I was pretty, but I tended to resign myself to what I saw as a simple fact and figured that since I didn't have looks to rely on maybe I should develop some personality to fall back on. I was too poor to compete and anyway, I didn't care that much in the first place about who was prettier. Because life isn't a fucking beauty contest, is why.

A point to consider here is that you might be a lot more attractive than you think, and personality can make up for a lot of physical shortcomings. Not so much the other way around. Counter-intuitive, I know. There are a lot of attractive people out there with shitty personalities and a lot of people who aren't conventionally attractive with amazing personalities. Guess who ends up with more friends. Guess who has healthier relationships. Not the attractive person with the shitty personality. People will only put up with so much for so long, after all. Looks will only get you a pass for a limited time.

There was a quote from the series Dead Like Me that sticks with me. "Death is kind of like sex in high school. If you knew how many times you missed having it, you’d be paralyzed." Putting the observation about how fragile life is aside for the moment, it also makes the point that we are oblivious to the others who find us attractive most of the time. Chances are there's someone out there who thinks you're extremely attractive, you just don't know it because they don't think they have a chance with you, etc. That's one of the ironic things about human attraction. We're intimidated by what we find beautiful and don't believe they could find us attractive back. 

All you have to do is look at the people around you with kids to know that it's not just pretty people having sex or having kids. In fact, most of us are not oil paintings and it doesn't seem to have held us back. Somebody passed on those genes to us, which means they got laid. Maybe, just maybe, it has nothing to do with meeting the cultural standard of beauty. Maybe it's not important that everybody finds you attractive so much as finding the one special individual who you think is beautiful and who thinks you're beautiful in return. The one who thinks you're a sight for sore eyes and thinks you're beautiful just as you are. It's a lot less work, and you get to accept yourself as you are too. 

Anyway, being beautiful isn't all it's cracked up to be. People are people. They have a lot of baggage surrounding self-worth and attractiveness which they tend to project onto people they consider attractive. If you qualify as objectively attractive, which is to say that more than a couple of people think so, it makes you a target for all of their insecurities. People who think it's a competition and that someone else has an unfair advantage, will steal their partner, etc. People who take out all of their resentment on someone beautiful because they've been turned down by someone attractive and felt humiliated. People who fetishize beauty to the point of dehumanizing an attractive person into an object. People who can't see past the outward appearance and bring all of their messed up ideas to the party. Being beautiful is like walking around with a target on your back. "Attractive" usually only means that you attract a lot of unwanted attention. 

And who profits from all of this? Advertisers. Everybody selling you something on the premise that you're not attractive enough as nature has made you. It's probably one of the biggest consumer industries on the planet, and all of it is geared toward planting insecurities and then reinforcing them and selling you something to fix what was never broken. If you translated advertising into plain language, you'd start hearing what they're really saying. "You're not good enough the way you are." "You stink, but nobody wants to tell you". "You're fat, you're ugly and you dress funny." Seriously, it's like hearing a schoolyard bully picking on someone. And then they hold up an impossible standard of beauty and tell people that if they don't look like that, they're shit. People kill themselves over it, both in the attempt to achieve it and in their failure to do so. The beauty industry has a body count, it's just indirect so it flies under the radar. And it's all so unnecessary and sad because we're wasting our time trying to chase something that doesn't really matter and miss out on things like healthy relationships and fulfilling lives. We're too busy trying to be prettier.