Are You Interested in Your Look?

Academics are good at pretending to be invested in the life of the mind and not the body. The idea that we just live this abstracted life of the mine is absurd. When we overthink our appearance, we can be accused of narcissism. But there is another way to think about narcisism, or at least self consciousness. If we see ourselves in the world, then we're connected to it. And narcisism for fraud, is associated with a fundamental sense of relatedness. We find ourselves inextricably caught up in the world which reflects us back into ourselves. It seems to me that intelligent self consciousness, or an alertness to yourself, is something