Curiosity is embedded in our DNA. Especially here at the start of another new year. We are annually programmed to wonder what our future is about to bring us.
At the same time, we would be right to also wonder how we got this far to even have a future. As individuals, as a society, as a species? Consider for a New Year’s moment what our species was like, say 500 years ago. If they were to see us now, what would they say? Very likely: “Gee, everyone looks so beautiful!”
Now it’s true there were beautiful people 500 years ago. However, were these visitors to check closer, they would find how today this passion for beauty amounts to totals tens of billions of dollars a year in pricey clothes and cosmetics, medications and treatments, schools and salons. More people are more likely to be deemed more beautiful than ever before.
If so, this then might be our visitors’ bottom-line question, as only one generation can put it to another: “Just how do you survive this first-in-history condition? How do you feel when you know beauty is a national obsession, but you are mostly ordinary?”
If that question doesn’t trigger a little twinge of recognition, good for you! That means you may be immune to the obsession. As the distinguished Eleanor Roosevelt once wisely wrote: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” That’s possibly the best concise advice for navigating a world of in which we are told beauty is the only True North.
Jack Spatafora
Park Ridge