Nearly 2,000 years ago, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote what we now know as “Meditations.” In his most famous work, Aurelius presents the inner self as a “citadel”— capable of remaining unshaken by external chaos. He said this tranquility could be achieved by controlling our perceptions, judgments and desires and aligning one’s thoughts with virtue and logic, rather than reacting to external pressures.
Centuries later, Mary Oliver echoes the importance of the inner self in her poem “Wild Geese,” which opens with the line “You do not have to be good … You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Both Aurelius and Oliver resist the idea that human value must be earned through constant self-optimization. Instead, Oliver reminds us that we do not need to justify our existence through achievement to deserve happiness, love or fulfillment.
Yet, as society has advanced, our focus has shifted. In modern society, focus on outward appearance has moved to the forefront. One study found that young women average about 36 negative thoughts about their appearance every day. Among men, some studies suggest that up to 98% of college-aged men experience regular dissatisfaction with their muscularity, driven by unrealistic ideals of a highly developed physique.
While we spend so much time attempting to perfect our outward appearances, we neglect deeper truths about our existence. For the countless times each day that we think negatively about how we look, how often do we consider how fortunate we are to have functioning bodies? How often do we view exercise as a celebration of what our bodies can do, rather than as punishment for what we hate about ourselves? Have we forgotten how to appreciate ourselves for the good we can do, rather than how good we can look?
Long before social media, literature warned us about this exact trajectory.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde tells the story of a young man who becomes obsessed with remaining desirable. After wishing that a portrait of him would age in his place, Dorian’s outward appearance remains flawless while the painting absorbs the consequences of his moral decay. As he pursues pleasure and appearance above all else, his inner self deteriorates, with the increasingly vile portrait of himself serving as proof of his sins.
Wilde’s novel asks a question that feels eerily modern: what happens when aesthetic obsession becomes more important than a moral system? Dorian’s life offers a clear answer. The prioritization of beauty above all else leads not to fulfillment, but to fragmentation. His external perfection masks internal collapse.
This cautionary tale now plays out in real time.
Amid today’s surge of insecurity, content creators like Clavicular (Braden Peters) have capitalized on an opportunity. Clavicular’s “looksmaxxing” brand promotes the idea that in order to be “enough,” individuals must maximize their appearance in every possible way, even though many aspects of the trend are dangerous. This fad aims to convince us that external beauty reflects internal goodness.
This is where Friedrich Nietzsche’s words begin to feel uncomfortably relevant. In the YouTube video by Henry Grey Earls, Nietzsche’s famous line — “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you” — is used to frame Clavicular’s online persona. Nietzsche originally wrote this in Beyond Good and Evil as a warning about immersing oneself too deeply in the study of darkness.
However, a culture obsessed with appearance, status and validation risks being consumed by those very things. This fixation reflects Nietzsche’s idea of nihilism — the collapse of deeper values and meaning — and creates what he calls the “last man:” comfortable, shallow creatures. When shared values decline, people turn not toward meaning, but toward social approval. Clavicular’s brand is a modern symbol of this debilitating condition.
The obsession with outward appearance extends into how we understand identity itself. In many corners of modern discourse, visible traits are treated not simply as aspects of a person, but as definitive proof of their beliefs, values and experiences. While these identities can shape how individuals move through the world, reducing a person to those traits risks flattening the complexity of human character into something far more superficial.
For young people especially, this can be deeply disorienting. When identity is framed as something fixed and externally discerned, rather than something developed through reflection and lived experience, we enter moral purgatory. It becomes easier for others — whether cultural forces or political movements — to appeal to surface-level traits rather than engage with deeper ideas.
To my fellow young people, we do not have to be “good” to be worthy and we certainly do not have to be perfect. We cannot continue to fall for a toxic culture that prioritizes outward appearance at the expense of authenticity, nor can we accept a broader cultural tendency to reduce people to what is externally visible. Maximizing appearance is a shortcut, just as reducing identity to visible categories or traits is intellectual laziness; both avoid the more difficult work of developing conviction, values and intellectual depth.
The challenge before us is not to reject self-improvement, but to redefine it. The real work lies in cultivating our inner selves and striving to make our lives and the lives of others as meaningful as possible. In a culture that constantly pulls our attention outward, choosing to look inward may be the most powerful act of all.
Caroline Hewat can be reached at [email protected].
