embodying over appearing

when aesthetics becomes the end, we’ve missed the point

Sep 20, 2023

Something I have become more attuned to lately as I have grown more sensitive to the inner state of others (and perhaps just a little older) is the unique beauty of an energetically alive older woman. A woman who has all the zest and vivaciousness for life we typically associate with youth. A woman who isn’t absorbed in how she is perceived. A woman who lives life with such a devotion to the moment that you can’t help but feel alive around her.

One such woman like this pranced into the café I’m sitting in, bouncing past me with untamed curly hair and a small stature. She moves like a wired coil of energy. She seems so alive, so content, so beautiful. I instantly want to know her, be around her. That’s what beauty feels like to me: an instant desire to be closer to it. I also like Chloe Cooper Jones’ definition—that beauty is a feeling of high attention.

I get this same feeling around the owner of my gym—she is well over 40 with two kids and couldn’t be more energetically beautiful. She fills you with a lust for life that completely transcends the physical. It’s this sense of: look at this amazing life! isn’t it lovely! aren’t we lucky!

beauty as an energetic phenomenon

Youth naturally begets the feeling of aliveness because when we’re young, we’re constantly immersed in novelty. Life’s wonder, joy and awe are always ricocheting through us (there is some useful statistic I can’t be bothered to dig up about how the majority of life’s “firsts” happen before or during our 20s). But as we get older, our sense of wonder and novelty wanes. That growing sense of “been there, done that” makes it challenging to keep youth’s natural zest for life alive. Which is perhaps why the quality is so striking and potent when found in someone who hasn’t been jaded by age—someone who transformed the opposite way: they grew in depth and beauty with each passing year. These uniquely beautiful beings fill you with a desire to be around them—because they feel undeniably full of (and in love with) life.

how do you make people feel?

I’ve been thinking more lately about my “future self”—not the person I’ll be in 1, 3 or 5 years, but the person I’ll (hopefully) be in 20+ years: what is she like? What kind of beauty does she focus on, identify with? What has she released? What has she grown into? What are the values she lives by? How does she make those around her feel?

Now you might say: you can’t control how you make others feel, so why focus on that? Which is fair, but it’s worth noting that I am not that interested in what others think about me, but how they feel around me. Aiming to control what people think is an egoic desire. A desire for people to validate how you want to be seen is different than wanting to be someone who fills others with certain feelings within themselves. The former focuses on who you appear to be, the latter focuses on who you are.

Our energetic presence has the greatest impact on those around us. Filling ourselves with the energy we want to see more of in the world might be the most subtle yet impactful form of service we can devote ourselves to. And there might be no better way to achieve it than to simply be someone we would want to be around. Given this, it feels worthwhile to ask ourselves: How can we embody the energy, feelings, and sense of aliveness we would want to be around?

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being > looking like

As I look towards the inevitable process of aging, I have been thinking about the kind of beauty I want to embody as I get older. I never want to get so attached to aesthetic beauty that I forget about the kind of beauty that transcends age and appearance: the intrinsic effect we have on others—how they feel around us.

The kind of beauty I aspire to is a growing a sense of aliveness and youth that expands independent of how my physical vessel evolves. I want to be the kind of person that holds you in an energetic aura of aliveness. The kind of person who fills others with life even as theirs passes. Who inspires others to engage more deeply with the moment, with their own curiosity. Who compels others to focus inwards instead of outwards. The kind of person who transcends the physical and invites others onto a plane much more interesting than what we can see and touch—the plane of feeling. What I am noticing as I write this is that I seem to aspire to embody the intrinsic qualities associated with youth and am less attracted to preserving youth’s extrinsic qualities. I understand why people do it, but I just don’t feel desire stir inside me towards preserving physically youthful qualities at all costs. Not because I think it is “Wrong” or “Unnatural” but because it displays a value I don’t resonate with: rejecting the natural cycles of life for the sake of aesthetics.

We are not meant to look youthful forever. There is a reason for that. I am always drawn to people who seem to accept and embrace aging, because their inner confidence shines through their physical being and creates an aura of beauty around them that draws your attention away from their physical vessel and towards what is underneath it.

My grandmother was one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met. I knew her from ages ~70-95. I never saw her in her peak “youthful” years. I hardly even noticed her appearance, aside from the smile that almost never left her face. Her energy was so alive, potent, warm and genuinely beautiful that she made you feel like her appearance was almost… irrelevant. It’s as if she saw her physical beauty as besides the point and in doing so, induced that belief into you. By having such beautiful energy, you didn’t even look for a physical dimension of beauty. It just wasn’t the point. The point was how she lived, how she made you feel, the love she embraced you in. I know everyone has their own definition of beauty, but I can’t think of a stronger form of beauty than being so energetically alive that people forget to even notice your physical appearance!

what you focus on, others notice

Altering your appearance to grasp onto the physical remnants of youth also draws more attention to your aesthetic presence than your energetic one. And I just don’t think that’s how aging is supposed to work: our physical vehicle keeps track of how we lived. We get older and with that age comes wisdom, memories, experiences, joy, laughter, sadness, stress. All of it. Our face and body display those emotional grooves. Our vessel is a record of how we lived, and the idea of erasing that energetic compounding just to look younger doesn’t sit well with me.

I am much more attracted to being conscious of how I age: the choices I make, the feelings I embody. Rather than assuming I can live however I want and choose to look how I want later on, I’d rather view how I live as the means to look the way I want. To view aging gracefully as a personal responsibility: a nudge to embody the feelings I want my future self to have, now. To furrow my brows less and smile more. To breathe deeply. To let go of tension in my body. I want my being—my essence, my energy, how I navigate life—to beget my beauty. Because aesthetics are not the point. The point is how I feel. The point is who I am.

do it to be the thing, not to look like the thing

What makes me uneasy about controlling aesthetics through unnatural means is that what is seen on the outside doesn’t reflect what has naturally transpired on the inside. And by portraying aesthetics that were not generated through how we actually lived, there is a disconnect—an asymmetry—between who we are on the inside and the outside. A wedge is driven between our external vessel and our inner being.

What we forget when we become hyper-focused on aesthetics is that we are usually changing the external because we want the internal feelings that would naturally cause that external change. Maybe you want to look younger because you want to feel or be younger. But the causation doesn’t flow from the outside in. It flows the other way: if you spend your life embodying youth, that zest for life will come through even as your skin loses its elasticity. But changing your aesthetics doesn’t change who you are. Because aesthetics were never meant to be the end we aim at. They were supposed to be the effect of who we are.

embodiment lasts, aesthetics don’t

I have always been suspicious of doing things purely for the sake of aesthetics. It never sat well with me, probably because any time I focused on aesthetics over embodiment, I got bored and gave up the actions I was doing to achieve an aesthetic. But when I focused on BEING the thing instead of just LOOKING LIKE the thing, the aesthetics came naturally and so did the feelings I was unconsciously seeking (which were much more powerful than any aesthetics that accompanied them). The aesthetics only came—and stayed—when they were not what I was seeking. They were the unintended side effect of becoming the person I was trying to look like I was.

The most obvious example of doing something to be the thing instead of look like the thing in my own life was doing competitive gymnastics. I was training 20+ hours weekly and, as a result, was quite fit and strong. But my fitness during that time was the effect of my devotion to my sport. Not the end I was doing it for. Our coaches never told us what to eat, what to look like, or how much to weigh. We were just focused on being strong and skilled (i.e. not looking strong and skilled). Everything flowed from who we were, not who we wanted to look like we were.

I was fortunate to never really get caught up in the obsessive aesthetic side of gymnastics I know many people stereotype it for. But stopping gymnastics did throw me for a loop: I got caught up in the aesthetics meme for a moment—I was terrified of losing the fitness my sport naturally gave me. I had a brief moment of being fixated on controlling my food/fitness/weight/whatever—my teenage girl coming-of-age experience of being insecure about my body, thinking about calories, obsessing over aesthetics. But eventually I realized that focusing on aesthetics only made me feel worse: it made me increasingly attached to how I looked instead of how I felt (which I learned is what ultimately really matters). I realized that I was the most fit when I wasn’t trying to look fit, but trying to be fit. And more generally, that being something is much more powerful than looking like you are that thing.

become what you want to look like you are

Optimizing for appearances is a never-ending cycle of seeking. Validation is an insatiable desire. Because even if you do get the approval you want, you then need to maintain it, forcing your existence to pivot around something impermanent and entirely out of your control: what others think. The primary problem with hyper-focusing on aesthetics is that you entangle your identity, self-worth and self-image with something you do not control—how you appear to others. Something you cannot lever up or down with action. All you can do is poke at your goal by trying to appear a certain way, but the deciding factor (what someone else thinks) is not up to you.

So: why do we spend all that effort trying to make people perceive us one way or another? The short answer is because we don’t see ourselves as who we want to be seen as. When you know who you are, the optics of who you are becomes less important. But when you don’t know who you are, you desperately try to control how others perceive you. Said differently: when your self-image is unstable, what others think seems important because external approval feels like a good way to compensate for internal insecurity (spoiler: it is not). But when your self-image is stable, what others think feels irrelevant because you have already fortified yourself from within.

the less you focus on aesthetics, the easier they come

The whole idea of aiming at aesthetics is sort of a funny paradox, because:

> the less attention you pay to how others perceive you

> the more energy you put in to what matters to you intrinsically

> the more you flourish at what you genuinely care about

> the more your aesthetics improve

> the better you are perceived

So: perception, optics, and aesthetics often do flow from becoming the person you want to be, but they are not the reason to do it. They are the unintended side effect of aiming at what you intrinsically desire. This is why we all have so much admiration those who are unapologetically themselves. I’ve written about how the coolest people are the people that never try to be cool. Their coolness is the unintended side effect of simply being themselves. By not caring about aesthetics, they’ve stumbled upon the perfect formula: don’t worry too much what others think, just focus on being who you want to be. Or: just be yourself. This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes, from Man’s Search for Meaning:

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.” — Victor Frankl

The quote speaks to the futility (or: the damaging effects) of aiming at something externally, just to ‘achieve’ it instead of focusing on the means that produces the external effect. Just as aiming at “looking fit” misses the point (which is being strong and fit), and aiming at “preserving aesthetic beauty” misses the point (which is being a beautiful person throughout your life), ignoring the means of what causes someone to “appear” one way or another, misses the point: to be the thing, not to look like the thing.

aiming at aesthetics hurts

Beyond the fact that aiming at aesthetics is a poor way to achieve your desired goal, it’s also just a shitty way to live. Always making choices and doing things based on what others will think has to be one of the most tiring commitments of all time. Instead of considering what others might think, figure out what you think. Ask yourself: what are your values? What matters to you? Invest your time and energy in that. Embody your values. Figure out who you want to be, then do what that person would do. That is how you reinforce lasting self-image. You build intrinsic confidence. You make promises to yourself and keep them. You do the work when no one is watching. You listen to your own inner signal and tune out the noise: what others think.

embody your true character, not a performance

When we obsess over how we are perceived, we weaken our internal character. We perform a different character than who we are based on what others might like. When they don’t respond well to that character, we go back to the workshop and augment it based on their reaction. This whole process is brutally exhausting and deeply unfulfilling. Every time someone reacts poorly to you, you have to rejig your entire persona just to inch closer to what might appeals to others. What a nightmare!

You might think you don’t do this (and hey, you might not), but the reality is that most of us are doing this constantly. We grow up unconsciously seeking social approval, because that’s how we fit in and feel like we belong (a primal human need). We get people to like us by morphing ourselves into someone we think others will like.

But eventually this impulse starts to work against us. Because the point of life isn’t to fit into a system we were funnelled into when we were kids, but to actually become ourselves. To self-actualize. To mine the unique gift inside us. To do what appeals to us and be great at it. And optimizing for optics, social approval, or aesthetics of any kind simply does not get us closer to that aim. Finding your own path requires you to do practically the opposite: to tune out what others think—to literally stop doing things for aesthetics—and instead do things because you believe in them. Because they matter to you independent of external perception. Because they create a sense of connection with yourself. To enrich your self-image, focus on becoming in the direction that matters to you. That is how we get what we think focusing on aesthetics will bring us: self-acceptance, self-confidence, and the revealing of our true character.

shifting gears

It’s disorienting to go from optimizing for approval to optimizing for becoming who you want to be regardless of what others think about it. It requires you to retrain how you see yourself. You have to get so good at validating yourself that your aesthetics—how you are interpreted by others—becomes an irrelevant distraction you practically don’t even notice. This is true freedom: when how you see yourself is derived from who you know you are internally over who you look like you are to others.

And funnily enough, it just so happens to be the best way to optimize for aesthetics. Because when you accept yourself fully and focus on who you are instead of what you look like, your external presence and inner being become symmetrical. Seamless. By becoming the version of yourself you wanted to be, you start to embody the feelings you craved when you were trying to look like someone you weren’t. You are the person that feels at ease, beautiful, confident, inspired, alive, aligned. You do the things that person would do. You slowly became them. You not only look like them, but you talk like them, act like them, move like them, introduce yourself as them.

The ultimate hack for aesthetics is therefore not focusing on aesthetics at all, but honing in on who your ideal self is—present, future or otherwise—and becoming them. Not on a superficial level, but on a deep intrinsic level that shifts your behaviour. If you want to be fit, then don’t focus on looking fit, focus on being fit. Do what a fit person would do: the workouts, the way of being, the boundaries, the whatever. If you want to be a writer—write! If you want to be in a healthy relationship—be the person that would be in a healthy relationship. Don’t seek out or hold on to people that the in-a-healthy-relationship-version-of-you wouldn’t approve of.

Be the person you want to become and the external effects will follow. But it needs to be real. It isn’t about what it looks like. Any superficiality to your effort will eventually fade and you will once again be left with who you genuinely are: the version of yourself underneath the aesthetic you were optimizing for. Because no amount of aesthetic-optimization will change how you feel—the most important metric in your life. There is no escaping the self. Who you are is always underneath who you are trying to be. As my favourite professor once said to me—there may or may not be a God, but one thing is for sure: there is a self and we have to answer to it. Consult yourself. Answer to yourself. Embody who you want to become. The rest is noise, especially what it looks like to everyone else.

Part 2 of this essay will explore the flip-side of this topic: how to harness your natural beauty to self-actualize. Sign up for future posts to get that essay when it is published.

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Related Mind Mine essays you might enjoy: how to be cool, self image, the masks we wear and what’s underneath them, becoming yourself is a process of reduction, intensity. You can also find my daily stream of consciousness on Twitter/X, and let me know if this essay sparked a thought or reflection by leaving a comment below:

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