In life, people will not always live up to a standard they or someone else will hold of themselves.
The path to improving oneself is one that can be very virtuous, but sometimes bad actors will like to muddy the waters of what is genuine self-improvement.
The recent trend of “looksmaxxing” is where a person will look at all of the superficial parts of themselves and try to conform to a sociality standard, whether genuine or perceived. This can lead to toxic people online trying to make others insecure in themselves and try to get them to act foolishly to conform.
A lot of the toxicity comes from the “involuntary celibate” or “incel” community online. These people are misogynistic losers who take out their frustrations in the world on women and their perceived actions. They lie and say women hold incredibly high standards and to impress them you must be absolutely perfect, showing no flaws. This is obviously false, but the incel community puts a confirmation bias into the minds of insecure young men, leading to more stupidity to pursue.
One recent trend from the incel community is looksmaxxing because they focus on trivial aspects of what can make a person outwardly attractive without looking inward, where it actually matters. Exercises within looksmaxxing can fall in between the comically benign, such as “mewing” which involves pressing one’s tongue to the roof of their mouth to get a better jawline, to severely dangerous, such as “bonesmashing” which involves someone intentionally fracturing the bones in their face to allegedly have the fracture heal and create a better jawline.
These exercises are beyond stupid to the point of parody. Performing tasks that will either do nothing or hurt yourself to conform to either a genuine or perceived societal standard should be mocked so no one can be dumb enough to actually try it.
Another perceived standard incels preach is having a positive canthal tilt, something no normal person is aware of. The canthal tilt is which direction your eyes point; having your eyes point toward your nose is a positive canthal tilt, which incels say is the most attractive.
Even if the societal standards incels were talking about were genuine, it would still be stupid to conform to them. It reminds me a lot about plastic surgery culture where people will risk a lot in order to change superficial details about themselves instead of finding better ways to be happy in their body. This is toxic as well.
I have nothing against changing yourself to feel better, but what the people in the incel communities and plastic surgery culture do not realize is that self-improvement should be done for yourself and not to impress other people. Practicing healthy things like dieting, exercise, positive thought and manifestation are things that I do to improve myself. I also try to be more productive such as reading a book, writing something, watching a movie or even playing a video game once in a while. I try to live passionately and for myself and practice self-love.
Additionally, something that has helped me along my self-improvement path is Albert Camus’ essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The essay describes how everything in life only has meaning if we give it meaning. This shows that what other people think of us does not matter unless we care about that person.
I feel we should care more about the people who leave a genuine impact in our life such as friends and not random people who will hate you because they do not find you outwardly attractive enough.
Nico Brazill can be contacted at
nbrazill@kscequinox.com
