Toxic thoughts - Schopenhauer, Tyler Durden and Matisse

EvgeniZyntx

It seems that the sense of self and the glossy fashion media are at war with each other. With the cannon fodder of impossible, beautiful and sexy young women being splashed right and left across these women's magazines, clothes advertisements and of course, the 5th column in the living room, the TV, what is a normal person to think? "I am not like them and cannot reach these heights of beauty" must certainly cross one's mind at least once. Once in a while? Once in a week? a day?

Perhaps a caricature but for some people, these thoughts seem like a toxic vicious circle - negativity, blame, depression, self-hate leading to inactivity, emotional eating and re-enforcement of a lifestyle (and a body) then is unhealthy - sedentary, passive and unfulfilled.

Perhaps the easiest solution is to go cold turkey and remove these awful invasions of the sexualized perfect body? But how realistic is that, how realistic is it to think that one can withdraw from the world of the media blitz, that this war of image can be won be closing your eyes? Might as well pluck them out.

I have a friend with body dysmorphic disorder, where she thinks that her body is very different than it really is, and this topic and how one might manage a sense of balance came up in conversation today with my college-age daughter. From her healthy point of view and her ability to find acceptance we really came to no sudden clarity, so I am left with leaving the question to you people.

How does one deal with toxic thinking? What solutions help to find some sort equilibrium?

In our conversation we sort of kept at the edges of ideas of Schopenhauer - not because we like to drop some dead German philosopher into conversations - but because he was the subject of an argument she had had with a schoolmate and because his ideas on individual motivation and the illogical and futile sense of human action fits so nicely with the uselessness of random diets to achieve perfect bodies as we inevitable age. And yet, and yet for all that futility and lack of direction that he wrote about he was passionate about love, his life and enjoyed food - enough to rate the restaurants where he ate.

He was, in this split personality of philosophy, an early-age Tyler Durden. And if you do not know who Tyler Durden is - well, go see Fight Club. This reference is best understood from the film or the book and I'm now too lazy to explain it. Let's just say that the (masculine) individual meaning in modern society is less than satisfactory and only danger, chaos and excitement offer a sense of freedom from that. Well, that's one possibility - go big or go home!
This twisted perspective certainly hold some attraction.

But neither Tyler Durden or Schopenhauer are really going to help my friend from her toxic thinking - she's not likely to join Project Mayhem, hates films with blood, and being German (my dysmorphic friend) find these philosophers over-blown and unreadable in the text. And I thought it was just poor translations.

From that extreme of throwing everything in and using despair like a tire iron, we talked about those glossy beauties and how unrealistic they are. How can someone become jealous of a piece of art? Which was the question, I asked my daughter. Would thinking about these women as creations help? After all, they are not so different from the blue woman of Matisse. A sort of cut out of curves and shapes and desires but just an artistic construction?

My daughter thinks I over-simplify - a mental image of the blue woman cannot really help to iconize the desire to become the glossy and reduce the obvious self-criticism that results. I'm less sure. No one is really jealous of a painting. I like the idea of a visual and mental technique to remind oneself to stop that vicious circle of negative thought.




Your ideas, your thoughts?

(Apologies to my daughter for taking parts of our conversation public)

EvgeniZyntx

Clearly, next time I'll just post about counting diet soda as water or show me yur (sic) sausage feast.