Some people really don’t care how they look.
Why lack of fashion statement is not always itself a statement. That totalizing reflex is a mass delusion.
YOU WON’T find this interesting or plausible:
The modern and ubiquitous social theory to assume that all presentation is signaling is wrong.
“I don’t care” isn’t always itself a signal.
We tend to push back on this though. We want even non-statements to be a statement.
We often find it more interesting to seek out new ways to totalize that “everything’s-a-statement” idea. Root it even deeper; find clever ways to shut down any dissenters who dare challenge it.
“All twoof is relative!” 🐶
Oh really? Is that statement relative or absolutely true? 😼
We LOVE that. Admit it.
In this vein, we’d also love a clean logical checkmate we can use to say that “Broadcasting you have no fashion statement is itself a statement.”
But it’s not. Not always.
That urge to insist that “even their indifference is a statement” is a totalizing reflex.
What if almost everyone has been taken under its intellectually lazy sway?
Maybe not everything is a fashion statement. If considered logically, we can’t force every aesthetic outcome into a signaling paradigm.
Intentioned signaling is extremely common but there are possible exceptions. Some style themselves deliberately, some people drift, and some really genuinely do not experience APPEARANCE as a signaling field at all.
Not “they’re pretending not to.”
Not “they’re signaling anti-signaling.”
Not “it’s a subconscious play.”
Just they are simply not tuned to that channel.
It’s not necessarily moral superiority or depth, although it could be.
It doesn’t HAVE to be a statement.
It literally objectively could be a blind spot or an authentic disinterest, or a neurodivergence in allocation of attentional bandwidth.
Yet we feel it tugging at us even now.
“But surely on SOME LEVEL everyone must be playing the signaling game…!? 😾
That irrepressible tug? That’s especially common in people who are DEEPLY invested in it. We need to believe others are, too.
The emotional investment we’ve made in mastering that sort of hierarchy-signaling arms race?
We shouldn’t be ashamed. We should own it.
But also, maybe consider that not everyone is like us after all.
Einstein late in life probably didn’t intentionally signal indifference. He was actually indifferent. It wasn’t a statement as much as just a true abstention in the way that some gurus can in fact achieve true emptiness.
🐶 “E= I don’t care”
This concept intersects cleanly with a couple things we care about right now.
AI and mindedness. (Or what it’d take to get us to default to caution.) Differences in cognition between “intelligent systems” seem to be a trending topic of interest.
Aha! Mental haute couture! Gotcha. 😼
There’s also a cool IWRS (increase wellbeing reduce suffering) connection. If we care about IWRS, we’ve got to allow for different legitimate modes of being.
But if we insist on universal signaling, it hurts people. We judge too harshly. It drains attention and causes anxiety.
It may be that true, widespread abstention from aesthetic warfare could be a welfare-positive adaptation.
It could free cognitive bandwidth for contribution and stop wasting resources on surface-signaling.
And who knows, maybe when we get around to tinkering with brains, we might want to turn down this signaling impulse. It takes up way too much space.
So here’s the steelgirl claim:
Not all appearance is signaling.
Totalizing signaling theories erase cognitive diversity.
Enforcing universal participation in aesthetic signaling increases unnecessary suffering.
Therefore, respecting genuine abstention aligns with IWRS.
Check out Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. In high-status circles, taste and style function as mandatory class signals.
Insisting everyone is signaling might actually have evolved to protect the hierarchy by keeping the game mandatory.
Maybe it’s time to change that assumption to signaling being optional.
Because if it is, then virtue can’t be inferred from aesthetic fluency as easily.
Anyone who’s decided that aesthetic fluency is proof of status may be a bit thrown off by this development. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
True abstention is rare, but it happens.
Perhaps we can learn to find it interesting when abstention is real. Become curious about why it’s happening, what it means.
If someone can genuinely not care about a domain that we for so long saw as survival-critical, it might make us feel like our own preoccupation is a character flaw.
And worse, that it’s one we’re CHOOSING. That thought can be exhausting.
But not as much as having to keep pushing the bullshit line that a lack of a statement is itself a statement.
If you disagree, you must’ve found the whole note above uninteresting.
If so, I find it interesting that you find it uninteresting.
Tell me more?
I just want to feel like I'm living in my pajamas. I dress to feel absolutely comfortable- but I also know what colors make my eyes pop and my skin glow, but all of that is also just for me. One of the reasons I never made it any bigger as a musician was because I fucking refused to pander to the male gaze, way back when. I quit makeup early (I also cannot abide the smothering feel of it on my skin) and my hair frequently looks like a family of rabbits has made it their home. And that is my esthetic, I guess.
Hehe
I remember being a kid, so like, kid memory here. Don’t quote me on quoting someone quoting Einstein. In fact upon googling I don’t even know where tf I read this. And I don’t care to look any more 😂
It was something like “Einstein was asked why he shaved his face with only water” and he replied ‘because it’s easier’
I mean, as I say, I know I rock a face of makeup but I can’t stand the feeling of it ON my face.