An Open Letter to Pretty People

I hate pretty people sometimes.  The problem with beautiful people is that they don’t have to try.  If you’re attractive yourself, you might not have noticed this.  But if you’re not particularly attractive, then I’m sure you’ve witnessed that the pretty people around you generally get treated better in life.  You might have even contributed to this as well, like going out of your way to help out an attractive customer at work when you would have otherwise ignored them.  Why we do this is simple enough: seeing someone that we want to mate with gets us excited and subconsciously willing to do whatever it takes to have sex with them.  While we as a species are obviously past the point of doing everything our instincts tell us, our instincts sure as hell still unconsciously direct a lot of our actions, especially when it deals with sex.  So when a fat guest asks me to turn down the heat in the room because she’s burning up, I consider her a bitch and put in the bare minimum effort to help her, but when a pretty guests asks me if she can have any hot cinnamon tea that my department doesn’t even have in stock, you can be assured that I’ll be rushing down 3 flights of stairs to steal some from another department.  Thus we come to the “curse” that pretty people have to put up with: they don’t get the chance to actually make themselves a better person.  The beautiful usually get whatever they want much more often than the average schlump, and they rarely get critical feedback of their actions.  And because of this, most beautiful people will grow up to be boring, underdeveloped people.

Most intelligent, cynical people who have spent a lot of time being a member of our society will agree on one thing: people suck.  And while I used to agree and back up Thomas Hobbes on the whole “people are born naturally evil” thing, I’ve come to realize that there are in fact a decent amount of truly good, interesting people in this world.  However, a majority of us are still lazy, selfish dicks.  Now what happens when one of the many lazy, selfish people of this world grows up beautiful with everything handed to them?  Chances are, they’ll totally take advantage of this handicap and never have to learn to be functional members of society.  There are even tons of career options based completely around just looking pretty for people, ranging from glamour models to strippers depending on just how pretty and lucky you are.  The really sad thing for these people is that when they get old and their beauty fades, they must now deal with the fact that they spent their youth avoiding the of building any remarkable personality or skills and are now withered shadows of nothingness.  Meanwhile, the average and ugly looking people of this world had to succeed using their own talent, and build relationships by developing a good personality (unless you’re born rich, which is a different though similar conversation), meaning that even the naturally born dicks of this world have to work a little bit to make life worthwhile.  As I’ve said before though, not everyone is a natural schmuck.  If a naturally decent person is born beautiful, they’ll ignore their beautiful person handicap and grow up like the rest of us.  If you meet someone who is beautiful yet has a great personality and/or remarkable talent and skills, you have just met a truly great person that is both an inspiration and totally out of your league.

The point of this post isn’t just to point out why most of the beautiful people of this world should hated for both getting through life easily and by hacking your sexual instincts by smiling at you, that has been pointed out by plenty of people before me (namely the South Park episode “The List”).  I want to discuss something I’ve been considering for a while: What if pretty people aren’t the shameless leeches of society that they appear to be?  Do the naturally beautifully actually contribute something to society?  If you were going to attempt to measure personal happiness, you’d probably look at dopamine levels.  A short explanation of dopamine is that it is the chemical compound that causes us to feel happy.  Think about the moment when an attractive person starts talking to you.  You immediately get excited, your heart starts fluttering, and dopamine floods your system.  Those lips, those eyes….. they’re like liquid happiness that you just want to bathe in forever.  

Happiness, as seen here

Albert Einstein once said: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.”  And while soon this desire morphs into a kind of heartache, you can’t argue that you body physically feels happy and energized.  What if this is the benefit that beautiful people give to our society?  You could argue that this brief moment of happiness isn’t enough to counterattack the damages that occur when a society is based around pleasing a population of pretty people that contribute nothing practical, but maybe it does.  I for one am going to try and live my life counteracting my own instincts, making it more balanced for me.  I’ll enjoy the view of a pretty girl to try to maximize my dopamine levels, then turn off my instincts and try to treat them extra-normal (oxymoron, I know) to level out the benefits they get from other people.  But so far I haven’t been too successful in the latter part.  I can’t help it!  They’re just too damn pretty.