P.S. “The Beautiful People” Are Just as Insecure as Everyone Else
Several years back, I was talking with a roommate about a woman we both knew who was a fine art/figure model that I had considered hiring to shoot with me in a photo shoot for a showcase I did some time before called, “The Ike Show.” Although she was very attractive, I wound up hiring someone else because I thought the other model was a better fit for my project.
In the conversation, I was remarking to him how insecure she was and his immediate response was, “No way. How can she be insecure? She’s hot.”
To that I said, “Dude, just because someone is good looking, it doesn’t mean they’re secure with themselves.”
I think that was a damning revelation to him because him, like many people, including me for a very long stretch of my life, assumed that being good looking automatically meant being comfortable in one’s own skin and having high self esteem. Nonetheless, even after my explanation, he still didn’t get it.
In this society, through our media, there is a high value placed on looks, everything else including having a good heart or being a healthy, happy balanced person to be damned. Businesses hire the beautiful models, actresses and singers to model their products so that people can associate their products with physical beauty and feel compelled to buy them in order to feel that connection to “beauty.” Magazines put the best looking people on their front cover. News segments and articles gush about the beauty of a certain celebrity. People spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on surgery every year to fit a certain beauty standard set by society.
Because of the messages of the media, people are led to base their entire self perception and value they have to offer as human beings on how good looking they think they are. Since the whole concept of self is equated with your outer beauty, when one is considered beautiful, they’re thought to have a high self esteem and have everything they need.
This is utter, errant nonsense.
As human beings, looks BARELY scratch the surface of who we are. Looks are just a small fraction and manifestation of who and what we really our at our core – an intangible essence comprised in part of our gifts, talents, desires, idiosyncrasies, whims, passions, wisdom, unique energy etc. As such, anyone who bases his or her value on their looks has a low self esteem because they’re devaluing who they are. If anyone were to tell you that they have a high self esteem because of how beautiful he or she thinks they are, they’re showing you their backsides of how actually low their self esteem really is due to their severely limited concept of self.
Plus, beautiful or not, EVERYONE is part of the human experience. Everyone has been subject to hurt in their lives. Everyone has had someone, whether it be a parent, a teacher, a friend, a classmate, or someone they barely knew say something to them that hurt their feelings. Everyone has been subject to some type of emotional wounding or trauma. Everyone has had disappointments in life. Everyone has dealt with some type of rejection or failure. Some people have used these experiences to become better, stronger versions of themselves. Others are carrying emotional baggage as a result of these experiences that have caused them to be very insecure with themselves. Being good looking is no way a reliable determinant of how well someone deals with what life throws at them.
Plus, a person may be confident about his or her looks, but have a whole myriad of things that they’re insecure about. It could be that they doubt their intelligence, or have a quirk about them that they don’t like, or some other aspect which, despite the fact they know they’re beautiful, erodes their self esteem.
Thus, that quintessentially good looking person that everyone worships could be dealing with the very same self loathing, insecurity, neediness, or self doubt that what society deems as the average looking is dealing with. They’re not some supernatural beings that are exempt from the common maladies that plague the human psyche, so stop objectifying them by putting them on a pedestal. They’re human like everyone else.
This is The Viable Alternative.
Hope this helps,
Ike Love
