Vanity

Unlike many people assume vanity does not imply a positive self-image. In fact, many popular trends on the Internet are actually vanity with a negative self-image. So-called „Looksmaxxing“ and „Gender Dysphoria“ in the broadest sense both are the product of vanity, of obsessing over one's flesh and obsessing over one's body. Both groups are pathologically obsessed with their own bodies and believe that their life will improve when they make enough changes to their physical appearance. This turns people away from the immaterial and makes them believe all there is to life is their own flesh. It's extreme materialism. Those people are mentally crippled and cannot perceive anything but their direct and immediate reality.

This has two aspects: 1) The concern with oneself 2) The concern of others about onself. Both are essentially an expression of the same psychological mechanism and are as such not much different: One is expressed inwards, the other outwards respectively.

There is a physical compontent to being human and it's a very important one, but what I mean is this particular patterns where one effectively only cares about their immediate reality and is crippled in such a way that makes them perceive themselves as their bodies only and also perceive the world around them as material objects only without anything more to it.

Wearing fancy clothes, washing oneself too often, or having fancy hair styles are the same, and yet they are so deeply ingrained in man that it is basically impossible to remove them from modern man's life. Obviously living like a caveman (and even that might be an understatement, since even prehistoric man decorated his body and did a plethora of other things in similar nature) is an ideal one cannot attain and is only possible to strive for as a vague goal. Focusing on appearance should be a matter of functionality and be kept to a minimum bordering to where one might get health problems from lack of hygiene or have to wear a thick jacket to avoid freezing. No human is like this, but perhaps that's something one can try to getting closer to and improve one own's humility.

As I write this post, I do think that it is quite ironic having me comment on vanity and humility whilst proposing my own „life-style“ as the ideal; perhaps that is true to a degree, but I want to point out that this text is merely to get the idea across and not to make me seem any more virtuous than I really am, because I am really not. (That is, if you consider being a NEET too lazy to wash himself rationalizing his thoughts as some pseud philosophy „virtuous“.)

Anyhow, the point is not to become crippled by the material realm and aim for more than just that.

Whilst not having read „Sun and Steel“, allegedly, a core point of the book is that you need to have a certain degree of physical fitness to effectively be a carrier for all your thought. I'm not sure whether that is the actual point, so for the sake of the argument that statement is standalone: In my idea of physical fitness (as a fatty I wouldn't know) the ideal still should be functionality and is therefor not in contradiction what I said previously. A body optimized for functionality and one for appearance might overlap with each other, but they are not the same. Many strongmen don't look anywhere close to what you would consider a „bodybuilder“ to look like and they certainly care more about their physical functionality than their physical appearance. As such sport as a means to physical functionality is admirable and worthwhile, while sport as a means to improve one's appearance might still be vain. Many sports are about maximizing ability in a certain area and can be seen, thus, as a higher-order goal.