We have simply come to accept
certain social norms. Seldom do we question them and more often we embrace
them. It is has been some time since I have heard of the word vanity. Vanity is the excessive
belief in one's own abilities or attractiveness to others. Nowadays vanity
is associated with glamour magazines that are read by billions of people. These
magazine names appear at the top of Google’s search results.
What is it about ourselves that
we so incessantly obsess about? The human body has always been a marvel for
many societies and was especially emphasised during Greek and Roman periods. Little
has changed.
The pursuit of perfection and the
exercise of control are fundamental in explaining vanity. Both, however, are
illusory. Humans are not perfect and the idea that we have control over a
volatile and random world is slightly misguided. The body is subject to gravity
and will over time decay before it reaches its terminal condition – dust.
Control is subject to a person’s ability to influence many factors around him
such as accidents, disease, money, maintaining a healthy body, etc. Combinations
of these factors are countless and any perfect exercise of control over these
factors is unlikely.
Another factor leading to vanity,
and probably the most important, is pride. I have spoken in length about pride in
previous posts. But once again this little devil emerges as a main culprit in
making the human spirit ill. Humanity’s ambition to be like gods causes us to
obsess about perfection. And this perfection manifests itself in the exterior
rather than improving our minds and souls. Our
appearance takes precedence over anything and soon we don’t see how silly we
really look.
What makes humans different from
one another? Nothing much; we want to be differentiated and, more worryingly, we
want to be better than everyone. We spend excessive amounts of our money and
time in sculpting a body or creating an image “worthy” of our thoughts. Instead
of taking a balanced and healthy view about our image we have become sick with
our own vanity and created something that is not original and more importantly
something that is not ourselves. It is not original because you recreate an
image of something that exists in a poster, in a movie or in a song. In fact
you lose yourself in wanting to become something else, something that society
dictates such as what beauty is. The irony is that in the pursuit of trying to
fill a void by focussing on the outward we become emptier.
Vanity is a sad fate if you really think about it deeply. It takes
up too much of our precious time, time that we can spend more productively such
as the pursuit of wisdom, caring for the needy or spending time with family and
friends. Vanity makes the individual the subject and everything else becomes of
secondary importance.
There is very little good that
could come from a vain life. We know that the pursuit of perfection is a futile
exercise, because as humans, we cannot be perfect. We know that control is
transitory and evades our clutches all the time. We know that elevating the
self means sacrificing loved ones and we know vanity is a destroyed of
originality. Despite all of these consequences, we make a conscious decision to
ignore it. We choose this knowing all
the problems. This could only mean
that the mind is not in a healthy and balanced state.
To find a cure for this disease
we need to ask ourselves, again, some very deep and difficult questions: Who are we? We are humans and not gods
and humans inevitably fail. Where are we
heading? We are heading towards death and the process is decay. We have
limited time to do worthy things and it would seem like such a waste if we
spend most of this time on ourselves.
What are worthy things? This is perhaps the most difficult question to
answer when it comes to vanity. I would argue that there is a hierarchy of
worthy pursuits in life: Searching for the subjective knowledge of our
existence (for me this wisdom manifests itself in getting to know God and
living for Him), living in harmony and loving each other, gaining knowledge
about how the world works and then, maintaining a healthy body.
I almost did not want to write
this entry. There are so many wise sayings, paintings, books and songs about
this topic that it almost seems over-explored. I think, however, that it is
good to remind ourselves of our shortcomings, it is better to acknowledge our
fallibility humans and it is best to be humble about what humanity is. Only
then can we see the world without tainted lenses.
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