People see vanity as a flaw in others. Should we?
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Last time I saw him, he smelled bad. Really bad. Don’t think he’d washed in a week. Maybe two. His hair was greasy and matted. Teeth were yellow. Clothes were stained. He wore mismatched socks and his t-shirt was inside-out. It was painful to behold: the depression was killing him.
He died a few days later. Suicide.
I realize now, and (alas) only in retrospect, that the signs were all there. When someone loses the will to look good, it’s often because they’ve begun to lose the will to live. Anyone who has worked with the elderly will tell you that: We knew Mrs. Johnson’s days were numbered when she stopped putting on her make-up in the morning. We knew Mrs. Cooper wasn’t long for this world when she stopped curling her hair.
Like most of you, I was vain in my early twenties. No doubt about that. But I was vain with a bad conscience. It felt like a character flaw. Something shameful. Something to be hidden from view. It’s a kind of hypocrisy that’s pretty much the norm in our culture. As the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb rightly observes in The Bed of Procrustes (2010):
“Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.”
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I used to despise vanity in myself and others. But at 40, I must confess that I’ve warmed to it. Indeed, I’ve come to see the wisdom in something Benjamin Franklin said in his Autobiography (something, truth be told, which I once found perverse): “Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others that are within his sphere of action; and therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life.”
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2015)
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