Should We Try To Impress People? (March 19, 2006)

My youngest son appears to have a crush on a girl at school, and it is a really positive thing for him. I think it has been the main reason he has lost 30 pounds. (Don't worry - I'm not humiliating him by writing about this in a public forum. He never reads this page.)

I myself went from chunky to slim at 14 mostly because I was madly in love with a girl in my 8th grade Sunday School class. Like Woody Allen and unlike Sigmund Freud I never had a latency period, and was yearly infatuated with some girl in school or church from kindergarten onward. But it wasn't until my teen years that it dawned on me that I might have to change some things about my appearance (stop being fat) and my character (stop being a jerk) in order to become half as appealing to my crushes as they were to me.

It is good that we want to impress people so that they will like us. That instinct can be degraded or put to bad use, but is in itself no mere vanity. It is a Swiss Army knife of personal formation, so versatile it can liposuct body fat, clean under the fingernails and uncork good manners all at the same time.

It made Jack Nicholson take his medication in "As Good As It Gets" (He explained to Helen Hunt, "You make me want to be a better man.") It made Sayuri learn to dance and be winsome in order to gain the Chairman's affections in Memoirs of a Geisha. And it even drove the Scarecrow to pursue learning, as he sang to Dorothy,
And perhaps I'd deserve you
And be even worthy of you
If I only had a brain.

It is good to want to impress somebody, as long as the person you want to impress is good. Don't waste your time trying to impress bad people. Sculpting your body will only attract their lust, and gaining capital will only provoke their greed. And remember that no matter what you do, some people are just not going to like you. That is o.k. - lots of people did not like Jesus. The important thing is to strive to behave in such a way that good people will like you.