Vanity behaves as being drug addiction. Consider among my students, when she comments body shaming, adds “I’m a model,” and waits for everybody to check impressed.


College Barbie’s always buying a fix.
Some people can’t enjoy just one single compliment, simply by itself. Immediately, we start anticipating another one. If it doesn’t arrive quickly enough, we’ll go ahead pursuit. We’ll start posting five selfies each day. Make little comments about ourselves and hope people validate them.
As well as worse, we’ll start criticizing ourselves in public areas and praying for you to part of. “Gosh, go through the muffin top on these jeans.” But there’s no muffin top. We just want a compliment.
Or there's a muffin top, and we still want a compliment.


If that doesn’t work, we’ll look for new clothes, or different makeup and hair products. We become prime targets for beauty dealers.
After all, consultants.


Ordinary people blame vain people for the direction they act. True, it’s irritating when some friend or coworker continues on and on about their looks. Their intellect. Their talent. Particularly if they’re pretty, smart, or talented. That’s whenever we judge them probably the most.
Either way, we need help - those folks based on external validation. The type that can’t always result from friends. Because let’s face it, we don’t want our friends to inform us we have a problem.


It’s on us in all honesty with ourselves. The planet of Victoria’s Secret and Maxim did a number around the self-confidence of women and men alike. We can’t depend on these to cure our vanity, though.
Attention only creates a dependence on more. That beautiful friend you can’t stand isn’t just vain. She’s a beauty junkie, who may need some help.


We wonder if they’ll ever be satisfied. If they’ll ever get enough attention. The solution is not any. They don’t get enough. Plus they never will.


Because attention only creates a dependence on more. Your friend isn’t just vain. She’s a junkie, and she may need your help.
I’ll remember my first hit, standing in line for any roller coaster at age 14. My friends explained, “Those guys behind us have already been looking at you for quarter-hour straight.”


Just what a rush.
It’s the type of high that may form an addiction. The type that ranks right up there with cigarettes, booze, and weed. Lucky for me personally, psychopaths don’t form addictions like other folks. (Roughly the most recent research says.)


We want to judge vanity. It’s an easy task to make fun of a person who can’t stop praising themselves. Yet underneath vanity lies deep insecurity that’s not funny.


A loose friend of mine from grad school practically lived from most of the vanity. In her defence, she was gorgeous. Instagram calibre. She was smart but prized her appearance above the rest.
In a few ways, her life was sad. Her relatives and buddies didn’t take her seriously. Neither did her husband. We also never fully accepted her. Not only due to her attitude, but our very own biases. To us, she was a trophy wife who’d decided to get yourself a doctorate from boredom.


We want to judge vanity. It’s an easy task to make fun of a person who can’t stop praising themselves. Yet underneath vanity lies deep insecurity that’s not funny.


She especially enjoyed predicting just how many men would harass her on the confirmed weekend. As though she were couching her vanity inside a complaint, but secretly getting excited about it. Her ambivalence was the type that this incel and red pill movements exploit to justify their abuse of women.


One time she said, “I wonder just how many catcalls I’m likely to enter this dress. Is it possible to even imagine?”
And I answered, “We’re in a conference, so hopefully few.”


That’s right, a conference. A pricey one. The type where you network like hell and make an effort to present yourself as a specialist all the time. Yet she could only concentrate on the prospects of male attention.


That day, she visited one panel and spent the others of her time flirting within the lobby and ordering overpriced lattes. Not mutually exclusive, needless to say. When many of us grabbed lunch to catch up and compare notes, she discussed various compliments she’d received from men.
At that time, I thought - wow, here’s someone who’s internalized every gender norm, every type of sexism.
If you literally can’t comply with social norms and expectations, you luck out of these. You might cope with them as external obstacles. Nevertheless, you never ingest the poison.


My pal irritated the majority of us. We’d gone into academia to flee the toxins of mainstream culture. It suited me well. My smile sucks, and my personality comes off as terse, almost cold (at the very least to strangers). No modelling career for me personally. But I could lecture on obscure topics all night.


Down the road, I began to realize the entire meaning of my friend’s behaviour at that conference. My odd mixture of autism and psychopathy could have saved me from your pressure that so numerous others succumb to.


If you literally can’t comply with social norms and expectations, you luck out of these. You might cope with them as external obstacles. Nevertheless, you never ingest the poison. Meanwhile, everybody else develops an addiction. To beauty. To intellect. Or even to the ego.
It was a very important thing I wasn’t as pretty as my pal. My flaws had saved me.


Maybe American culture had made my pal this way by giving the absolute wrong incentives. Rewarding her for toxic behaviours, essentially training her to value her looks and nothing else. Hence, her brain treats conferences and dance clubs in the same way.
That trip taught me another thing. It was a very important thing I wasn’t as pretty as her. My flaws had saved my ass. If I’d had the opportunity to smile on cue and flirt, imagine what might’ve happened certainly to me.


Related info:

https://todayihear.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-tragic-story-of-beautiful-girl.html

http://todayihear.blogspot.com/2018/12/Women-Behavior-About-Men-Attraction.html

http://todayihear.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-beauty-secrets-of-french-women.html

http://todayihear.blogspot.com/2019/01/07-astonishing-facts-about-women-body.html