How much do you allow the media to influence your definition of looking good?
The advertising media has one goal — to create a message that speaks directly to our need to look good, to our need to be like the models who have an army of professionals to style them, light them, and Photoshop them until they are totally fictional characters — and we buy right into their messages to us. We succumb to the very calculated influence of advertising and do exactly what they want us to do. We do whatever it takes to emulate ‘the beautiful people’ in every way possible to look as good as they do.
We believe that once we have those fashionable jeans, are wearing a very sensual perfume and our chic underwear, while driving the perfect car, and showing up at all of the right places, we will definitely look good. Of course, once we do all this, it should certainly make us feel good, right? Wrong.
Why not? Even with all of “the right things” advertised to make us look good, feeling good about ourselves just doesn’t last when the feeling is based on temporary external fixes. They are just a Band-Aid. They don’t change the root cause of our need to feel better, so feeling good about ourselves doesn’t last.
Having all of the right things to look good won’t make us feel good about ourselves for real and it won’t make us happy for real either. We might feel good about all of our possessions, but that is quite different from feeling good about ourselves. The way we feel about our possessions won’t give us self-dependent esteem or feelings of self-worth from the inside out.
