It breaks my heart to see the world adopting any horrible invention the regime in Iran has done. Internet verification, nationalization of corporations, all the crap they envisioned.
Important part of life is maintenance. You think things are easy, but keeping your shape, not getting addicted, protecting yourself against this harsh world… all of it is maintenance. And it will always be as such.
People who think much about material life, partially understand their wardrobe frames them. I do not take the sense of fashion that situates a person in a narrow fantasy, but I state the person who sees their look depends on what they wear. But I also understand those who take such a belief and ridicule it. As they rightly state “you are beautiful just as you are” and “material life doesn’t change you”.
What fascinates me is the reoccurrence of such stories. If there was a conclusion to this or other matters alike (perhaps Perfectionism vs. Being Early) we might have been settled for life.
But what makes these to reappear is more fundamental than one would imagine. Marshal McLuhan saw media as “extensions of man”. We are—by definition—cyborgs. We wear a cloth as our secondary skin to a point that not wearing it puts one in jail and brings us shame. We commute with anything but our own legs. We think and sense our world in a created invention called language; and in another invention called abstraction.
We are insane and in pain because we are cyborgs. Our whole story and problems revolves around this complex relationship with tools that are parts of us.