Today's
post is a teaser for a major article I'm working on for tomorrow that
draws together self-experimentation, ego, imaginative poverty,
procrastination, lack of innovation, addiction, freakonomics, feedback
and learned helplessness. Stay tuned.
We had brunch today (it's
a holiday here in Canada) with a group of neighbours, and got to
talking about how Europeans (many of our neighbours are
first-generation Canadians who often return to their country of birth,
principally in Europe) of all ages and social classes have become
obsessed with their personal attractiveness. This manifests itself,
they said, in:
- Preoccupation with physical appearance:
youthfulness, lack of wrinkles or other 'imperfections', 'healthy'
tans, zero fat, appropriate posture and 'pose', not a hair out of place
etc.
- Preoccupation with wearing the 'right' (in the perception
of their 'peers') clothes: brand names, appropriate and fashionable
colours and fabrics, no wrinkles (unless the fabric calls for them) etc.
- Preoccupation with knowing and being seen with the 'right' people: the rich, famous, and popular
- Preoccupation
with observing and judging others: standing (or in restaurants,
sitting) where they can see others and others can see them, taking note
of others' facial and body language when first attracting others'
attention (doesn't matter whether they are strangers on the subway or
people they know well), 'all the right moves', passing (often
disdainful) judgement on others (through eye, facial and body language,
whispers to one's clique followed by knowing, put-down glances towards
others, etc.)
This all struck me as very juvenile, so I was
surprised at the unanimity of views of our brunch group that this now
extends even to those in their senior years. At first I thought this
might be a defensive reaction to the fact that most of us North
Americans, frankly, are pretty sloppy dressers compared to most
Europeans. But they said this held even to immediate relatives 'back in
the old country'.
So I asked what they thought was behind this
strange and neurotic behaviour, which I have observed here (and have
been told is common) among teenagers at school/the mall and among
twenty-somethings in bars and other singles gathering places, but not
among older or 'married' people (our children said it was a great
relief when they married, or began living common law, that they didn't
need to 'bother with that stuff' anymore).
My neighbours had
never thought about the cause for this 'crazy' behaviour, so I tossed
out some candidates: vanity, a warped sense of values, low self-esteem
-- aha!, they said, that's it
-- it's insecurity. What are they insecure about?, I asked. One
neighbour told me "It's like they never grew up. Marital fidelity isn't
as strong a bond or commitment there as it is in North America, so
they're still trying to impress the opposite sex. And when you're
always looking at others, sizing them up, it becomes a habit, you
notice them sizing you up as well, and there's a whole tacit language
that builds up around that, a language of judgements that label you
without a word being spoken. That's very intimidating, and it takes a
pretty big ego to ignore or brush off an endless crowd of people
looking at you disdainfully, telling you that you don't measure up,
that you could and should be doing better. It's tyrannical, but that's
the way it is, just like with teenagers here."
I was still
perplexed. "I can see the point in continuing to look after your own
health and fitness, and quietly complimenting or even harmlessly
flirting with others, even into old age. It's harmless, it's an extra
nudge to take good care of yourself, it's fun and it's good for the
ego. But why do they need to put down others, what is the cause of the
deep-seated insecurity that would drive people to belittle others just
to build up their own egos. That still strikes me as pretty insecure."
"But
it escalates, you see", she said. "If you flirt with your eyes with
those you are attracted to, then when someone averts their gaze or
ignores you or (worse) doesn't even notice you, that's a kind of
put-down in itself. So to create a scale of approval/disapproval that
neutralizes that, you need to add an overt level of disapproval,
so that you don't hurt people's feelings just by not noticing them. So
then, if you're insecure (as especially the young are) you start over-using
the hurtful disapproval signals to bolster your own (and your equally
insecure friends') self-esteem. If you're on the receiving end of that
often enough, it starts to get to you and you get caught up in the game
as well, and you start obsessing about avoiding the disapproval signals
and augmenting the number of approval signals, even if it causes you to
do ridiculous things, like spending an hour a day in a tanning bed or
spending 2000€ on an outfit."
Well, I keep saying that what we
want more than anything else is appreciation and attention, so this
does make sense to me in a warped kind of way. I'm also aware, since
reading Impro, that dominant-submissive behaviour, status-seeking,
finding your place in the social 'pecking order', is instinctive to all
creatures including humans, for what were once very valid reasons.
I'm
a sloppy dresser with a big ego who has lived his whole life in an
upper-middle class milieu in a society that at least pretends to be
blind to class and status, though I'm aware that I am perhaps too blind to it myself, preventing me from understanding other people's behaviours and even their impressions of me.
So
educate me: How important is all of this to who we are and what we do?
Is my neighbour right in her perception of how insecurity and/or
status-seeking drives our behaviour, often in dysfunctional ways? And
is it insecurity (low self-esteem) that lurks behind most of this
behaviour, or is it an instinctive drive to set and seek status, relative position in the social (shudder)
hierarchy? Your answers have a bearing on some of what I'm writing
about in tomorrow's article, so I'd really value your thoughts. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
