The vanity of appearance

on trying to be maximally likeable

Portrait of Mrs N.N (Teodora Mukułowska, 1907)

Someone drove into my parked car the other day, someone who doesn’t have insurance and potentially not even a license, which is really fun.

Anyway, as I was sitting in the mechanic’s cramped waiting room that smelt vaguely of metal shavings, old rubber, and sweat, waiting for a quote to repair my back bumper, I was looking through articles I’d saved to read on my phone, since I forgot to bring my battered copy of Crime and Punishment (a tragic, almost unforgiveable mistake, to forget to bring one’s book on an outing). I came across an old interview with Sam Altman where he said something that caught my attention. Something like: “We are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit.”

This is one of the ideas that my brain has continued to circle and probe and poke at over the last few months, which is usually a sign it’s time to write an essay on it. Social influence. How sensitive and susceptible we are to what others think of us, at all times, often without even realizing it. I’m beginning to believe it’s the most pervasive and consuming force in determining what we say and do and think. So pervasive, it’s invisible.

I moved to a new city a year ago and in the first few months, I continually found myself in new social settings meeting new people. Sometimes in social settings, when I am aware and calm, there is enough interior space to both act and watch myself acting. Almost always, I notice how much I care about making a certain impression on other people, having them think about me a certain way. I notice how much I want to be liked and not do anything that makes me disliked. I can almost hear this quiet but constant script in the back of my head, monitoring how I appear before others, how people react to me, smile or look away or lean back or frown, how the smallest of words or gestures or glances can exert enough leverage to make my image of self bend. I can even begin to evaluate everything I say or do through the eyes of another and what kind of impression it will make and whether it’s the one I want to make. To be a little simplistic but basically accurate, I notice how I want to present myself in a way that is maximally likeable. Most of this, mind you, goes on completely behind the doors of conscious perception.

There are a few paradoxes at play here. One is that by trying to present an image of myself that I figure is maximally likeable, I am actually less likeable than if I was just myself. The very effort of trying to appear attractive or impressive or smart is what makes me feel less attractive and less impressive and self-conscious about my intelligence. (What “myself” means is mostly unclear, other than the fact that it lacks the strained effort of performance). The other paradox is that even if I’m successful in this, and people seem to like me because they smile or laugh or touch my elbow or whatnot, I am only sent deeper into the conviction that I’m somehow broken, because the approval I’ve gained has nothing to do with who I really am on the inside. Not to mention, this whole game, this overwhelming need to be liked, is accompanied by a constant fear of rejection. A fear that will suddenly and forcibly break in that people are tired or bored with me and see through my basic falsity. I’ve even noticed that with people I really want to like me, people I admire or am attracted to, this pressure becomes so palpable that I can barely speak, never mind clearly articulate my thoughts. This is often dismissed as “nervousness” or “awkwardness,” but I think that’s mislabeling for something that has more to do with cosmic validation¹.

This, I submit, is why social media is false and bad. It allows us to fabricate an image, turn the dials, create a kind of managed window into our lives that we approve others to look through. Not only is this whole charade exhausting (in a way that the word “exhausting” doesn’t even come close), but even if you get a lot of likes or followers or whatever, it’s not really you that’s loved. And you know that, deep in your proverbial bones. And you cannot fool yourself out of the nausea that follows as you are sent deeper into the conviction that who you really are on the inside is unpresentable and lame and mostly pathetic. This is sometimes called “wearing a mask,” which is a soppy and annoying cliche for something deeper and serious and more sinister. It doesn’t just maim; it murders².

The modern response to this line of reasoning is something like, “Don’t care what others think of you, just be you,” which is so brainless and naive and misaligned with the basic building blocks of human nature that I can barely stomach explaining it. I do not think our social sensitivity is a mistake or a flaw. It can be pathologized, no doubt, but it is generally a very good thing that we care what others think of us and are held morally accountable by basic social rules and guidelines that regulate our behavior and probably stop many from going off the deep end.

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen has that famous line about how “pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” A certain amount of vanity is necessary and unavoidable. But, past that point, vanity becomes deadly. And, especially with technology, there are ways vanity can be encouraged, inflamed, on a large and lethal scale.

Recently, I’ve been wary of the vanity of writing; its corrupting influence. (It took me a few hundred words to get around to what I really wanted to say, but that’s how it works sometimes.)

See, you start writing purely for personal fun. Because you read a lot and love words and think too much and your friends are tired of your philosophical tangents and you want a way to make sense of your head or, at least, get your thoughts to leave you alone. But then, if you keep at it long enough, your writing starts to get more attention. Praise pours in from people you don’t know and your friends are impressed and one time a pretty girl from Paris emails to tell you in a shy, cute way she has a note in her phone with her favorite sentences of yours. This kind of attention is impossible to dislike, even if it makes you confused and uncomfortable³. It produces a strange and morbidly sweet sensation you’re pretty sure isn’t good for you, but you also don’t want to stop.

Naturally, you want the new essays you write to be liked too. Pretty soon, without really noticing, you start filtering your thoughts and feelings for what you think would be liked and sound interesting, mostly to show off and look impressive and get people to think you’re a good writer. You find you care about your image now and how many people read your stuff. And you see other writers’ stuff that gets more likes and attention and you can’t help but wonder if it’s better and more interesting and worthy than your stuff. You start writing things solely because you think it will get an equal amount of attention, an above-average number of likes, instead of talking, with probity and care, about what fascinates you and makes you feel alive, even if it’s unpopular or weird⁴.

The success you have, whether you like it or not, becomes proof. A way to furnish your pride, feed your vanity. Something you can point to quietly, almost imperceptibly, to affirm your silent and hidden belief that you were right all along: You are exceptional.

But the problem is that even if this new writing is liked and admired, you feel like a fraud. Because the image of who you think you need to be in order to be loved isn’t really you in the flesh and blood. There’s a gap now between who you are in writing and who you are in real life. And your handiwork shows, most prominently to yourself. The crooked pieces you tried to square away, the parts that are too embarrassing or ugly or shameful and have to be hidden, the stuff you don’t want to let anyone else see—it bulges out, pokes through the seams of you. You are afraid of being found out.

This creation of yours turns out to be more of a monster than a madonna, a certain betrayal of self, and starts to only highlight how terrible and unlikeable you actually are. But, it also feeds a hollow and insecure part of you that likes creating an aura, that wants to live in that aura, that thinks maybe it is the real you, and enjoys seeing yourself as someone special, set apart⁵. This insecure part, you realize, is where most of your pride originates, as a way to compensate for what you don’t want to confront within yourself.

Don’t get me wrong, there are also moments where you put out something you think is really good and people don’t seem to care and it kills you, in a way. But this is still vanity, just the opposite end.

Writing is frustrating and hard and confusing because despite the fact that you know it has a wide surface area for sin, you also love words and care about words and communicating old truths and complicated emotional realities and probably couldn’t stop without becoming restless and sad⁶. And when you step outside your tangle of abstract thought, there is the basic fact that someone halfway across the world had enough excitement and courage to tell you the words that came out of your hands made them feel a little less lonely.

Here is the question looping in my mind as of late: If my right hand was causing me to sin, would I cut it off? This saying has become trivialized from overuse, but it’s a serious saying and I’m saying it seriously. Am I willing to take extreme measures to remove the things in my life that are leading me astray, even if I love and depend on them? If my write hand was causing me to sin, would I cut it off? The answer, if I’m worth my salt, would have to be yes.

I wish I had a storybook ending, a kind of happy, glowy narrative arc where I tell you how I overcame the vanity of writing for good and conquered my ego and rediscovered the fun of writing in a childlike, enduring way, then disappeared into the sunset. But I don’t. If anything, it’s a battle that has to be considered and fought every day. We must die to self daily.

Although all this icky, skin-crawly talk about vanity does communicate something important: the necessity of love. Real, genuine, human, messy, face-to-face love. The kind of love where you don’t have to pretend or worry if they like you or will leave you. The love where someone pulls down your mask or pokes their fingers clean through, sees the brokenness and loves you anyway. Where you meet someone who is your match and can’t be fooled, or doesn’t want to be fooled, by the less broken, maximally likeable person that you’re pretending to be. Someone who doesn’t try to squeeze you through a hole or place you in a box, but meets you in the freedom of space. Meets you in conversation. Meets you as someone they can’t quite understand but want to try anyway.

And, in comparison, likes on an essay from strangers or trying to win approval from people you don’t know becomes less than nothing, emptiness. A striving after the wind.

Walk slowly and often,

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1. The funnel for what I could say that would make this person like and admire and respect and potentially maybe perhaps fall in love with me gets so intense and merciless and small that nothing gets through.

By the by, I think this sits at the core of what Fitzgerald kept trying to communicate in all his work, the one idea he kept repeating, the experience he was pounded and shattered and dazzled by—the female rejection thing. How some men are rejected by a girl they placed on a pedestal and never get over it and it shipwrecks their lives.

Daisy was money for Gatsby, something he was deprived of in his youth and desired desperately. Maybe a girl is status, athleticism, intelligence, even a certain cottagecore wholesomeness. I think the quality is less important because what it really represents is a rejection from some imagined upper echelon of existence that they have access to and you don’t. They are in some inner ring, where a good life waits, while you are stuck on the outside looking in.

That is the heart of Fitzgerald’s writing, I think. This immense cosmic rejection fractaling through the dark eyes of a beautiful woman.

2. I had a good conversation with a friend about how it feels like our phones, these glass slabs, are little altars. Glass altars we worship at. (Glass being reflective, allowing us really to worship ourselves in a milky, distorted image).

And, above anything else, what we love will direct our lives. What we love is who we are.

3. I've hidden my stats on Substack which, if you're a writer on here, I would recommend. I don't want data, I don't want to track open rates or revenue growth, I don't want to optimize or maximize or create data-driven feedback loops. I just want to write thoughtful, cozy kitchen-table essays that a few people read with a coffee in the morning and it makes them feel understood and seen and maybe a little less lonely.

4. Of course, the cruel and reflexive part of all this is that I know this essay will be read, and a part of me is very aware of how this makes me look and wants it to be liked and admired and have you think I’m deep and sincere and self-aware and confident enough to talk about this stuff. Or, to really get to the heart of things, to show I’m mostly free of this vanity stuff because I have the awareness to recognize it.

5. This, perhaps, is the best argument against keeping your writing clean and neat and unstained and postured to be read by other people, in a kind of polished display case, ultimately to get them to create an ideal out of you and your seemingly unbroken life so they continue to read your stuff and admire you and maybe even pay you money. It creates a schism of self. An image you must labour to maintain. An image you become increasingly tormented by and disgusted with, because not only do you have to hope nothing spills through the cracks and no balls drop and you aren’t found out, but you become painfully, almost pathologically aware of its basic fraudulence. In short, you feel like a fraud.

But, at the same time, it doesn’t seem helpful or constructive to complain and confess and bleed all over people. Or, to turn your life into a business, something for public consumption and display. (There’s a lot of wisdom, I think, in the Catholic tradition of only confessing to one trusted person.)

This is why fiction might be the only intellectually and emotionally honest writing that still respects discretion.

6. Writing also, in my experience, makes you viscerally aware of the razor’s edge on which you walk. There are a million ways to go wrong, and one straight and narrow way to go right.