Cost-beauty analysis

What's the opposite of doom-prepping?

Please don’t make me read the new Jia Tolentino article about cosmetic procedures, or: the paradigm of visibly worrying about how one looks, when worry is the worst of all looks. I thought recent articles by Emmeline Clein and Zoe Dubno (both New York natives, maybe importantly?) were great at capturing a certain impasse felt by women—specifically women who decided long ago that our winningest quality wouldn’t be beauty—entering this age of sink-or-swim surface optimization.

The argument always leads to an ironically shallow understanding of dialectical reasoning, or today’s stupefying overuse of the phrase, “two [contradictory] things can be true at once.” You might spend time and money preventing something that may have never occurred, and you’ll never know exactly how well you did.

What is known: you won’t get the time or money back. Yes, some prefer the realm of possibility, others the most tangible of realities, and there is a vast, varied middle ground. I’ll tell you, when it comes to “stacks” that weigh down life’s already sinking bubble of available spontaneity, not everyone is doing all that. My friends with intense routines don’t let those stop them from living in the moment and staying out late, otherwise we’d have difficulty being friends.

There is more to say about rage-bait recognizing rage-bait, plus the performance of hustle that intertwines with all other forms of maximizing appearances for a gamified life; there’s looksmaxxing, moneymaxxing, and, one I heard just today, geomaxxing (relocating to improve one’s dating prospects, leveraging economic disparities or cultural preferences to enhance sexual market value—or, in boomer parlance, sex tourism). Spending more time on the topic, for now, feels something like getting caught in its trap.

To celebrate director Ross McElwee’s new documentary, Remake, a 4k restoration of Sherman’s March (1986) is playing three times a day until the 16th at Film Forum. I went last night and fell for its individual portraits of beautiful Southern women in the nuclear 1980s: McElwee’s sister, who gets blepharoplasty and a “fanny tuck” shortly after getting married; the living-off-the-land linguist who sunbathes nude among ticks; the burned out activist; the aspiring actress; the divorced model; the interior designer planning to move off-grid with gun-toting libertarians; the apocalypse-ready Mormon; the lounge singer with a snarling guard dog; the “golden girl” lawyer—each advocating for the world to wildly change, each wanting, in the interim, to feel protected by a man. Much of it acts as a time-and-place capsule, but more of it feels emotionally timeless.

I’m getting ready for a trip that involves many stops of differing agendas and potentials: city, marina, sea, countryside, castle (?). Some would see this as a shopping excuse, with a difficult packing challenge to follow. I see it as I see all my half-vacations (always still working, sort of), an opportunity to test the integrity of existing belongings, taking what fits in a non-rolling bag to literal desert islands. I’m doing a little shopping, too, of course.