I’m going to be a little mean in this post, but I have good intentions.
You’re a dirty liar. That’s right. You do it every day, and you don’t even realize who it’s hurting. You probably think of them as white lies. Or maybe you don’t even think of them. But they’re there. And people’s lives are ruined because of them.
You once told a fat girl that she looked beautiful. She didn’t.
In an old post on inner beauty, I got into a bit of an argument with a reader who was complaining about my definition of beauty – it has to be tangible. Yes, like a firm ass or a nice pair of tits, or rock hard abs and a jaw-line cut from granite. Inner beauty has to meet the same, incredibly obvious standards as physical attractiveness. You aren’t a good person if you’re a lazy sloth who is so emotionally distraught that you push your problems onto friends and family. To have “inner beauty,” you have to do things, on a regular basis, that put you above and beyond your peers in that characteristic.
Beauty is a superior characteristic. A fat girl does not look beautiful. She might be an incredibly good person, above and beyond her friends and acquaintances, but she is very often less physically attractive than an average girl by the general public’s standards.
Not only that, but her body weight leads to pain, suffering, and a shorter life.
And that girl who is emotionally distraught all of the time? She has all sorts of people telling her how wonderful she is to try to cheer her up.
There are two simplified aspects to motivation: the pursuit of pleasure, which is brought on by knowing that the results of your actions will make you feel good, and the avoidance of pain, which means you’ll act to avoid physically or mentally harmful stimuli.
If you go on telling your fat friends and emotionally incompetent friends that they’re actually OK, you’re taking away one of the most powerful tools that they’ve been biologically gifted with. Pain. When they have to acknowledge that their life is going downhill because they haven’t chosen to take action and remedy their own situation, then they stand a better chance at living a healthy life.
You don’t have to tell them that they’re fashion-failures, massively obese or emotionally ticking time bombs.
You just have to stop lying.
And go back to Radical Honesty and look at yourself. Every time I do this I become a better person, because, not despite, of the pain.
Enjoy irresponsibly.