logoalt Hacker News

asdffyesterday at 8:01 PM1 replyview on HN

Everyone looks great if they live healthily and groom themselves. No one is actually an ugly duckling.

>If we all die after 80 or so years then what's the point of doing anything? Why get a job, why put any effort into personal grooming?

Because you want to be fit and healthy? All these surgeries are orthogonal to that. Every surgery is risky even medically necessary ones. You shower and groom yourself to prevent skin issues. You work out to simulate the hunter gatherer lifestyle your body is adapted to in the modern society which does not sufficiently pressure these adaptions. This stuff is your oil change and tire rotation. It is maintenance really. These surgeries are not maintenance however. It is like ricing the civic while it burns oil and the transmission makes scary sounds.


Replies

atleastoptimalyesterday at 8:13 PM

> Everyone looks great if they live healthily and groom themselves.

Not true for everyone. Simply living healthily and grooming, you are still limited by the ceiling imposed by your body. Sometimes it just doesn't live up to the aesthetic demands of the human psyche, used to a superstimulus of attractiveness as the norm.

>Every surgery is risky even medically necessary ones

Most cosmetic surgeries carry very little risk, your overall risk from even being a moderate drinker, commuting to work in a car, being mildly overweight are far higher in aggregate.

My main point is, the human modern social world isn't a perfect arbiter of reward based on whether you are doing all the "right things", by being generally healthy.

Sometimes people get a disease, like cancer, and nothing our body evolved to do can help, but human-invented therapies can actually help. Likewise, you can be perfectly healthy and nevertheless start balding, and no amount of generally being healthy is going to fix it, and no amount of generally being healthy will mitigate the minor albeit real social cost of it.

show 1 reply