Licking the Razor's Edge (2015)

Addiction #14 – Freedom from BEAUTY
“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an
eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.” ~ Albert Camus
“Every person in the United States participates in a daily beauty pageant, whether he or
she likes it or not. Engulfed by a popular culture saturated with images of idealized, airbrushed
and unattainable physical beauty, we cannot escape feeling judged on the basis
of our appearance.” ~ anonymous
In Japan, there is a popular concept of Beauty that appreciates the way the human body
naturally changes over the course of a lifetime; the way the passage of time sculpts a
person’s appearance and form; where what is considered “beautiful” remains deeply
connected with what is patently natural.
In the west, however (indeed, in many countries around the world), “beauty” is a status
reserved only for the young, the athletic &/or the shapely. In the west, “being beautiful”
requires that we keep our bodies in a changeless state; a perpetually radiant nubility
where women are always “pretty” (see “fertile”) and men are always “fit” (see “virile”).
It is a standard that is patently unnatural and one that fights the flow of time. And it
inspires a set of unnatural behaviors that are as dangerous as they are addictive – from
women slicing open their bodies &/or injecting them with neurotoxins (Botox) &/or
starving themselves to remain “hot”, to men laying for hours in tanning booths &/or
imbibing hundreds of carcinogenic fitness-supplements on order to appear “sexy”.
And what are the costs of such a violation of the flow of Nature? For many hundreds of
thousands of people, the results of this futile struggle are disease (including cancer),
depression, poverty and/or mental illness (including most eating disorders). In essence,
at least in the west, the quest for “beauty” has become more than a mere obsession … It
has become an epidemic.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF OUR ADDICTION TO APPEARANCE
When we speak of the overarching human addiction to beauty, we are talking about more
than a few bouts of the “blues”. Our culture’s insistence that we become addicted to
vanity has devastating consequences that affect our physical health, our mental stability
and our emotional well-being.
*According to one recent study, more than 80% of women in the United States are
dissatisfied with their physical appearance, and nearly 10 million of those women suffer
from an eating disorder such as anorexia or bulimia as a result.
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