Day 20–100 Days 100 Ways To A Body Positive Mindset
Why do we care so much about how we look?
Why do so many of us — myself included — develop this fascination of having the ‘perfect body?’ From our most impressionable years, especially in Western culture, we start to tie body image to happiness, or success, or both.
This could turn out to be a very long essay, maybe even a thesis, going into our parents’/friends’/siblings’ behaviors, TV, marketing, etc. But I’ll focus on the tie with happiness. After all, I’ve not heard of anyone who says they’re happier spending all of their time obsessing over their body, have you?
Knowledge
In Raj Raghunathan’s book If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy? it is pointed out that we humans tend to devalue happiness because it is too abstract, compared with tangible qualities such as money, fame, beauty and status. The author argues that because happiness isn’t a concrete idea, we try to achieve other things like rock-hard abs, a six-figure salary, Instagram followers, because we think they will lead to happiness. (Still not having a solid idea of what we want.) This is also known as the fluency effect.
Raghunathan writes extensively about a Genie experiment, where he asks people what people would ask a Genie if they could ask any three…
