She's Writing a Novel

During my workouts, I sometimes indulge in the daytime cable television offered on the treadmill entertainment systems. I'm shelling out $70 bucks a month for the privilege of running in place for an hour a day in a climate controlled environment; I may as well try to squeeze my money's worth and watch the extra channels I'm paying for.

The best shows to watch while working out are shows featuring fit attractive people wearing not much clothing. Music videos are good for this, but so are shows like Top Model. It's all about finding motivation, and few things are more motivating than envy. Free market economies are entirely dependent on it; despite the fact that most hippies and liberals and broke-ass hipster crybabies will say that the capitalist machine runs on greed, the truth is that it runs on envy. You want what someone else has - their house, their car, their image, their clothes, their body, their girlfriend, their furniture - you name it. Life is about getting what you want, and it's often hard to know what you want until you see someone else who has it first.

That's not a bad thing, and even if it was a bad thing that doesn't change the fact that it's the reality. Fundamentally, we all envy each other one thing: happiness. Everything else we envy is just what we determine to be the means for attaining what we envy above all else. All our trading and bartering, all our advanced cultures and societies built on the discovery of ever-more efficient modes of trading and bartering, are because our species learned not just to need things for our survival, but to envy things for our happiness.

The religious types have to villify envy because if they didn't, more people might realize they have their own roads to happiness that don't involve religion and don't lead to a god, and then religion would be out of job. This is also the reason why religious types have to pretend to be SO much happier than everybody else all the time. I used to wonder why religious people acted like fucking manics, and I've realized now that it's because they know they've got a hard sell on their hands (don't drink, don't fuck, stave off all your appetites and lusts, read this really bad old book a lot, etc). How do you convince people that all the stuff in life that is fun and makes them happy is bad and that replacing it with repressed behavior and banal ideas is good? No one at a dance club is going to envy anyone in a church for a good time...unless the people in the church pull the envy trump card by trying to demonstrate that their religion is the secret to the most happy happiness of all. This is why people in churches act like they've been lobotomized. It fools some people for awhile, but all those "backsliders" that religions talk about are just people who got sucked in by the wide smiles, but after they took a long hard look around the place realized there was nothing there to make these people happy but their own delusions. And some people would rather live in honest unhappiness comforted by pleasure than in false happiness dependent on delusion.

Anyway, envy is what makes the world go round and it's what gets me through the fourth mile on the treadmill. Although sometimes I like to watch shows where the people no one ever envies get a shot at changing that. My favorite of these is Extreme Makeover. People who look like anything from freakishly hideous to just old before their time are completely remodeled -- and while none of them turn out like models, they become average attractive people, something they never could have hoped to be otherwise.

The big reveal at the end of the show is the best part; both because you get to see the final result, but also the reactions from the friends and family to the final result. The first response is shock, followed by smiles, followed by expressions that are trying to hide an expression of envy or lust. Everybody suddenly realizes that their fat/ugly friend or lover is no longer their fat/ugly friend or lover - they are a reasonably attractive, sexually desireable, and blissfully happy friend or lover. They are a completely different person.

The New York Times had an article about the way a person's social circle responds to their plastic surgery; more often than not, responses are not positive:

"...women gave various reasons for less than ecstatic responses to their surgeries:
some said that looking better and feeling more confident unhinged boyfriends and
husbands; a few had relatives who disapproved of the cost; and some said that
friends became jealous and competitive."

What was surprising to me was that people seemed to find this surprising. Maybe plastic surgeons need to warn their patients: you should probably find new friends, you should probably dump your boyfriend, you should probably plan to ignore your family indefinately.

Whatever you feel about it as the case, appearances are a big part of the social pecking order. And when you climb up a rung on that ladder, everyone on your old rung is going to panic. The husband or boyfriend will panic especially, because now his female will attract attention --and therefore options-- beyond him.

Any woman dating a guy who prefers her to dress dumpy and doesn't motivate her to lose those last five or ten pounds --instead of telling her to hit the gym, and to put on a miniskirt -- is dating a guy beneath her. It means she has the potential to land a guy who is a little more attractive, a little more successful, a little more together in life (maybe a lot more) and her boyfriend knows it. So he tries to sabotage her appearance to keep away the competition; a woman with an extra twenty pounds on her is better than no woman at all, or a woman with an extra 100 pounds on her. He'll tell her she looks good when she doesn't; not to appease her, but to deceive her. And if she develops chronic insecurity about her appearance? Even better, because now she is going to stick with him for security. He'll do everything he can do keep her from making an effort to look good, because if she starts to look good -- or worse, realizes that she looks good-- she might also start to wonder what she's doing with him when there are a lot of other desirable men who think she is beautiful.

Envy inspires some people to climb as high as they can and be their best selves. But there are lazy bitches and useless bastards who find it easier to just try to pull as many people as they can down to their level in life. And you can know who they are, because when you try to make a step up in life reaching for your own happiness, they are the ones telling you not to bother. They are the ones standing in your way. They are the dead weight you feel when you try to go anywhere. And they are the ones who will try to punish you for it when you succeed, to try to make you miserable enough that you'll scurry back down to them.

These are the people that, when you stop and look around and see that you are happy where you are, you realize you've left them somewhere far behind.