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| Oliver says it all. Scene from Little Miss Sunshine |
Do not read this italicized paragraph, it's depressing.
Skip to Beauty and Bad Faith if you're in a particularly good mood. If not, welcome aboard.
Lately I've been changing my mind far more often than I'd like. Not about politics or football, but about things I once considered settled. Beauty. Authenticity. The strange habit we have of borrowing other people's opinions until they begin to sound like our own. Perhaps that's simply what growing up feels like. You spend years collecting certainties, only to realise they're mostly souvenirs from someone else's journey.
Beauty and Bad Faith.
The other day someone in an MBTI group asked a deceptively simple question: What is beauty? The answers arrived with remarkable confidence. Everyone had a definition, and everyone quietly believed theirs to be the definition. That's always fascinated me. The moment we call something objective, we usually stop asking where it came from in the first place. Sartre would've probably smiled. His notion of bad faith has always struck me as less about lying to others than quietly outsourcing yourself. You inherit ideas, wear them long enough, and eventually mistake them for your own reflection. Beauty is one of those ideas. It arrives through films, advertisements, magazines, Instagram, billboards, and the occasional stranger with suspiciously strong opinions. Somewhere along the way we forget to ask whether we ever chose it ourselves. Ideas travel rather like gossip. By the time they've reached the fifth person, nobody remembers where they began.
Beauty and Locke's Tabula Rasa.
John Locke imagined the mind as a blank slate. Not empty forever, but wonderfully impressionable. Whether he was entirely right isn't really the point. The point is that many of the things we call "natural" arrive suspiciously well dressed in culture. Beauty included. Margaret Atwood understood this rather well. One of the things I admire about her novels is that beauty is rarely something her characters simply possess. More often it's something they negotiate, perform, inherit, resist, or quietly suffer under. Standards have a peculiar habit of pretending they've always existed. They haven't. Fashion is forgetful. Literary canons aren't terribly different. Every generation insists it has discovered greatness, when more often it has merely agreed upon it.
What's even Beauty at this point?
This entire train of thought began because I stumbled across a post insisting that one body type was objectively more beautiful than another. The comments were almost entertaining. Half defended one ideal, the other half defended another, and very few questioned the game itself. It reminded me of Patch Adams. There's a scene where a patient asks Patch how many fingers he can see. The obvious answer is four, but the point isn't arithmetic. It's perspective. Shift your focus and the question changes before the answer does. Beauty has always seemed similar to me. We're so busy counting fingers that we rarely notice the hand. We catalogue faces, measurements, skin, hair, weight, symmetry, all while overlooking the person carrying them. It feels like trying to understand a novel by judging the cover.
Stop Chasing.
Confucius is often credited with saying that beauty is everywhere; not everyone sees it. Whether those were his exact words hardly matters. The idea survives. I sometimes think we've mistaken beauty for a destination rather than a way of looking. We chase it in mirrors, filters, advertisements, and other people's approval, while it quietly exists in places that never advertise themselves. A laugh that arrives unexpectedly. Someone who remembers how you take your coffee. The smell of rain before a storm. A face that has never learned to perform for a camera. If there's one thing I've gradually unlearned, it's the urge to pursue someone else's definition of beautiful. Trends expire. Algorithms change. Fashion reinvents itself every other Tuesday. I'd rather keep my own eyes. They're imperfect, occasionally biased, and probably in need of stronger glasses, but at least they're mine.
Love,
Emad.
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