Insecurity is the new jealousy: Kristen Leo is too dumb for Instagram

okay okay as I used to say on this
channel all the time it ain't deep but it's real this is a little bit parallel to the type of advice I've given to video game addicts I had people write back to me in response to my videos about video game addiction what-have-you and it's the easiest thing in the world to say to someone who's played video games compulsively all their life oh well you should get other hobbies you should get other interests and their problem is from when they were six years old or something this has been their only hobby and interest and it's it's not easy it's not like you can just flip a switch and suddenly become you know a profound intellectual person with a lot of meaning in your life that makes playing video games seem relatively meaningless or trivial alright these women cannot just flip a switch and become substantive intellectuals with humanitarian interests and historical interests what have you that make Instagram and their physical appearance seem petty or trivial in their lives and for someone like Kristen Leo at age 28 in many ways it's too late such a waste of time and I know it's so hard because even myself working on social media knowing how fake it is knowing that there's just so much wrong with it I still find myself comparing myself to other girls and that's where the unfollow button is a great tool and I know it can be hard sometimes but this is an act of self-love go through your following if anyone even makes you the slightest bit like insecure feeling not good about yourself unfollow them my New England goes on Instagram and some feeling like [ __ ] and like I need a million different procedures done to my body and to my face in order to look like I'm not a troll that just crawled out of a gutter and my the only one that gets irritated when scrolling through endless pictures that just make you feel like your life is never gonna be enough and never gonna amount to anything I just can't scroll on the feed anymore I remember I did this like two years ago and I unfollowed so many people and people even message to me like hey why do I follow me you have a problem with me and I was like honestly no like I love you as a person but sometimes I feel insecure when I see your photos if you're focused only on appearance how do you grow on the other fields of your life how do you get better how do you become the greatest version of yourself that you can be if all you care about is your appearance when those people post pictures of themselves where they look perfect and you already have sort of an idea of how great their lives are and then you get it in a picture form and in more pictures and more experience of all the things that they do we don't want a great life they have it it wrecks your confidence 1 1 wow wow wow it wrecks your confidence and as much as you're trying to reason it all good you know their life isn't always perfect you know that but it's really hard to reason with that Wow it happens in an instant you're just scrolling on the fee you see the picture and you immediately feel bad and then you keep scrolling you can see someone else's picture and then feel even worse yeah I used to be a teenager and I was insanely affected by images and if a younger generation is getting influenced to value appearance over an thing else and it's told and if you want to be pretty you've got to lighten your skin you gotta do lip fillers you got to get boob job you got to stop eating you got a drink skinny tea and wear girdles on your waist like a little I'm really not lying when I say that Instagram makes me feel it makes me feel like a monster like I see this perfect picture this beautiful girl and then I look in the mirror and I'm like oh god kill it it's it's just so intense how horrible it makes me feel about myself and I think that I have enough common sense to be like okay this is making me not like myself so I'm now gonna expose myself to this as I used to say on this channel all the time it ain't deep but it's real this is admittedly a shallow issue but shallow does not mean silly shallow does not mean unimportant I think this is an issue that's tremendously important for a lot of men and women watching this channel a lot of men and women who never will the videos I'm quoting here are of two women and I can't even say young women Kristin leo is 28 I think I think the other woman recording I think she's about 26 27 so these are fully grown adult women and they're struggling to deal with their own shallowness and stupidity on camera and from my perspective they are utterly failing to do so they're utterly failing to as the most simple and obvious comparative questions about what this all means in their own lives and on planet earth okay I raise the question here in text on screen why is it you only talk about physical beauty here why don't you make any comparisons to other sorts of accomplishments in life intellectual or otherwise now we're living through a period of time when it's become a bit popular again probably just due to academic necessity for people to buy an empty plot of land and build their own house you might know about the time house fed so on and so forth obviously that's as old as time itself some of my grandparents I think on both sides the family built their own houses at different times and something I can imagine doing myself all right I will never be a great architect I will never be a brilliant architect I will never even build a great house right but I can build my own house I can build a house that is in some sense uniquely mine uniquely my own and there may be some satisfaction that I can build a house the best I can [Laughter] most of us watching this video I think it's true my soul I don't think I could ever be a great novelist you know and why would I serve I mean I haven't spent my life practicing the art with a craft or what have you I haven't even spent my life reading novels I really read nonfiction okay but I could write a novel that's uniquely my own right that's distinctively of me and by me and not not for me it's for you it's for the audience right and there's some value in that and yet it's not in these areas it's not in creative writing or architecture or anything else that these women feel insecurity it's not I mean there's this poem Ozymandias you know look on my look on my works ye mighty and feel ashamed or something they don't feel ashamed of themselves looking at the pyramids of the of Egypt they shave themselves looking at the accomplishments of Napoleon what a new poll yet accomplished by your age they don't look at Julius Caesar and they don't look at any of the great figures of history right I'm ancient modern Dark Ages in between no these are women who choose to look at models on Instagram and that's what their sense of self-worth is to a shoe that's with this puzzle of insecurities attached to you I just want to add you're the observation that I see throughout our society and I'm speaking broadly here of the modern Western world I see this remarkable pattern of beautiful women only being friends with other beautiful women I think that's a pattern that starts in primary school I think it's a pattern that starts in childhood when people aren't even really aware of the social or sexual value of beauty or human inequality when they don't think of it in those terms when they definitely don't think of beauty as a competition for the attention of the opposite sex or a competition for popularity on Instagram or for the possibility of getting a modeling contract or something else and I think that people are really made more brittle by just not hearing the perspective of those who are really ugly you know I think there's something to be said for intellectuals hearing the perspective of people who are stupid or even who are mentally disabled I you'll be a digression edge but I think that's part of the positive value of democracy but you may be an expert on solar power but can you come out and present at City Hall and argument for the advantages and disadvantages of solar power that the average man can understand or even someone of below-average Joe Blow average education intelligence can understand there's actually sense which we ourselves are trained and benefit by presenting something from our own area of expertise to a general audience or you know that brilliant people actually do benefit from having friends and colleagues who are not so brilliant and there's no doubt in my mind that someone like Kristen Leo would have a very different perspective on the world if she had just one friend who was really born within this shape and face like you know I don't yeah beauty is in the eye of the beholder blah blah blah but you know we all know this there's a sense in which some people are born with chromosomal disorders some people are born so misshapen and so ugly that the chance for them to ever be married the chance for them to ever have a single boyfriend is slim with they're not thinking about life at all from this perspective of can I compete to be the top of the Instagram he or you know does her boyfriend think I'm prettier than she is or this kind of no and I want to add - apart from the beauty is in the eye of the beholder distraction there's also this question of oh well beauty is culturally relative this problem exists in every culture in every continent you can know Japanese people who are basically by accident of birth of course to some extent health and fitness come into it but fundamentally they are born so beautiful that they never need to get a job and they're always well they're always offered jobs they're offered a role as a model and a TV presenter and so on from a very early age they're told that talented have these managers just because their appearance and you can meet people at the opposite extreme who all their lives are the object of pity and derision because they're so ugly their faces so misshapen that's true in Japan and you can meet people from Africa who are at the opposite extremes so even if within their own culture the precise fine-tuning of who is the most beautiful who gets the modeling contract or what-have-you differs that's not what we're talking about here we're talking about the stark inequality between the different levels of beauty and ugliness and as I say it's really disturbing to me that what I see with the female of the species I don't see this with men they're handsome men who have ugly friends I've gotta tell you if Western culture I don't see it what I see is with women organizing themselves into tribes were their only friends with other women who are equally beautiful as themselves and then of course this is normalizing and creates a kind of echo chamber so if you're a woman who spends a lot of time on hair and makeup all your friends are about the same level of attractiveness and they all spend time on hair or makeup you're a woman who goes to the gym for six hours a week and it becomes normal view of all female friends who go to the gym for six hours a week so on and so forth and you end up I think with this really strange myopic and brittle perspective of the people we've seen on camera now all right this is a little bit parallel to the type of advice I've given to videogame addicts I had people write back to me in response to my videos about the video game addiction and it's the easiest thing in the world to say to someone who's played video games compulsively all their life oh well you should get other hobbies you should get their interest and their problem is from when they were six years old or something this has been their only hobby and interest and it's it's not easy it's not like you can just flip a switch and suddenly become you know a profound intellectual person with a lot of meaning in your life that makes playing video games seem relatively meaningless or trivial alright these women cannot just flip a switch and become substantive intellectuals with humanitarian interests and historical interests what have you that make Instagram and their physical appearance seem petty or trivial on their lives and for someone like Kristen Leo at age 28 in many ways it's too late all right age 30 is coming and she saw as the mentality of a 16 year old at best and not again even amongst 16 year olds this would be kind of shockingly shallow and petty um and I sympathize all right sympathy is an analytical tool I can analyze this situation sympathetically and see oh she's gotten herself into this mindset now instinctually in terms of evolution every other way competition for scarce resources make sense if you go to a school where there's only one good-looking boy you want or maybe there are two or three attractive males you want uses your situation in high school and you're competing with the other girls for that same boy I understand your feeling about your appearance and so on matters if you're actually competing for the same contract as a model or you're in a singing competition that's implicitly about how beautiful you are and you feel you're in competition for who's the prettiest amongst the other singers of the other models I understand that's makes sense what we've got here is a situation where that competitive instinct has become unglued from its pragmatic function and it's become generalized to be a kind of neuro applied to the whole world to life to how you perceive even a website you perceive reality itself okay and it it is as Freud Sigmund Freud said all neurosis is in principle sexual alright of course it's sexual because you're not doing this with authors you're not doing this with intellectuals you're not doing this with architects you're not walking through a beautifully designed building and thinking wow I could never come up with the blueprints for this even if I had all the budget in the world with my little plot of land I could never build a house that looks like this or design an office that that's right you can you never will and you're never even gonna try you're never even gonna you know push yourself to that limit and try to accomplish something like that in architecture you failed you fail from day one you know no this is only and exclusively in the domain of beauty because of the bizarre way in which beauty is at all times linked to sexual competition even if you aren't aware that it is [Music]