“You know how Aristotle was Alexander the Great’s tutor?” I ask. And you look at me, curious but won’t show it. “Graduating middle school on Zoom, what was that like?” I ask, and you shrug, “I don’t think about that,” and there is no expression on your face. What is an expression but a giving away—a concession or a charity.
“We are only beginning to understand the repercussions of COVID on young minds,” someone comments under that video of you graduating. You look sort of evil in it, in the video. Children, can they be evil? Or only in retrospect? Like when people ask: “Would you go back in time and kill baby Hitler?” Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, says children have an inherent amorality. And are you writing this down? The amorality is a good thing, he says; it’s life-affirming; the child creates its own values.
This is what the looksmaxxing community has done: it has created a set of values. Though when I tell you this, you disagree. “We didn’t create it,” you say, “it was always like that; we’re just trying to ascend; we didn’t create the world.” You are monotone, so devoid of reaction or inflection. I, on the other hand, am animated and aim to please. Reminding myself that you’d think I’m a jester, I try to tone it down, but then my job here is not to please you; instead, I am, perhaps, here to let you see the value of a jester and his (or her!) privilege.
“No value in a jester,” you say.
“But they’re allowed to get away with so much.”
“Yeah, because they’re clowns, literally,” and then you continue, “there’s a lot you can get away with; that doesn’t mean you’re valuable or you add value to anything. Getting away is not valuable.”
**
How does one learn? What is the knowledge analog of taking a hammer to your jaw?
Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer was my first association. Of course, his hammer is just testing the hollowness of the idols.
“Yeah, like a lot of stuff is just empty; it’s devoid of any real meaning. I’m trying to help people become High Value,” you say.
I say, “So basically through these conversations, I want to help you knowledge-maxx, and in return obviously I’m handsomely compensated, no pun intended.”
You blink.
I suddenly feel shy.
When I was young, I wanted to be famous. I wanted to be looked at and admired; this impulse in me, I must admit, has not totally worn off.
I want to walk out and say this was a mistake. I feel old. I think about how life is short but also long, and I haven’t really stopped trying.
“Man errs, till he has ceased to strive.” That’s from Goethe. We talk about Faust and Mephistopheles, and you like the part in the beginning where Mephisto restores Faust’s youth, and you like it when, in the end, Faust is redeemed despite his countless sins.
**
We’re sitting in Los Angeles; it’s the first time we’ve met. This happened sort of unexpectedly; right time, right place, right? And also, a lot of desperate emails sent on my part, mostly because I needed a job.
“I have to meet him,” I said in an email to Ana, an esthetician who gives me Botox. She told me you were looking for a tutor. “A tutor for what?” “Just someone to help him get smarter,” Ana said while she put on her latex gloves and drew dots on my forehead with her white pencil in her Chinatown apartment. She knew you because you guys met at New York Fashion Week, and at an afterparty she injected you with peptides; in fact, you had purchased peptides from her on many occasions after that. You mentioned you were looking for a tutor, and you posted about it on your story too.
“I wanna mindmog now,” you said on a livestream I watched with glee; I knew then that our paths would cross. See, I am also extreme; I am also in search of perfection; I am a woman of ideals.
**
I tell you about Plato’s Theory of Forms.
I stare at your jaw and your bone structure, and I think to myself, I can’t believe the bone-smashing works. Like, I really didn’t think it would work, but looking at you, you have an impressive jawline, though I can also see some contouring and foundation.
“Yeah, I wear makeup; it’s not gay.”
“I didn’t say it was,” I say. But I was thinking about how a preoccupation with looks is an inherently feminine trait. Is that sexist? You talk about taking girls home, implying sex, but I must admit when I look at you there’s nothing erotic about you. It’s almost as if you have, in your looksmaxxing journey, forsaken the lifeforce of Eros in exchange for sterile and digital ascent.
You agree with Plato that the physical world is flawed; you cite “sub-human asymmetries” as the reason.
When will you know that you’ve reached ultimate looksmaxxing? In other words, what is the model of perfection for you? And is this model unchanging?
“It’s a mathematical calculation,” you say. “It’s all about ROI.”
I tell you about Naive Realism; you say you like that concept and would prefer that over whatever the hell Plato was talking about. “Looks are the most important thing,” you say, so then why have a tutor? “I don’t wanna be smarter than I am good-looking; I just want to be able to be intellectual-max. If I can quote Plato, that’s a high-IQ status multiplier,” you say.
But at a later occasion, you said Plato was “coping.”
**
“He’s actually a great performance artist,” my friend Lily says. Lily is an art critic. She’s obsessed with you; she thinks you are a sort of cyborgian post-sex future that makes sense with the rise of A.I. and everything. She thinks you’re a genius, truly. She keeps asking me to introduce you.
You post on X, “looksmaxxing is will to power.” I press the like button.
“The media is going to say you’re right-wing for that post,” I tell you.
“I don’t care, looksmaxxing is apolitical. I’m mogging while they’re seething, bro,” you say.
You remind me of a character in a Bret Easton Ellis novel or a Ryan Murphy television show. I start taking adderall again.
“Would you act?” I ask. “You could be in the remake of American Psycho.”
“You should come on the road with me, and we’ll stream and talk about philosophy,” you say.
I think about it, and eventually I say no. “I’m not a striver,” I say with shame but also with dignity.
You say, “I think you want certain things but for some reason won’t follow through.”
“Things seem to be on the precipice of decay; nothing worth following through,” I say.
“That’s cope,” you say. “You should be willmaxxing. Ana said you cried after she injected you with some Botox, like 22 units, which is what babies get if they got Botox,” you say.
“Right, but I had never gotten Botox before, so I was scared.”
“Don’t be scared,” you say.
There are things you say to me that imply that you think I’m basically too human. Like the one time I make you laugh, I think you resent it. You say, “Your relatability is a weakness.” I internalize that for a while and believe you, but that’s just the way God made me, so there’s nothing I can do about that.
**
The last time we speak is on Zoom. You say you understand it all. You say that everything you learned only reinforces the beliefs you already hold. I envy that. You say you’d read books in your spare time. You even subscribe to my Substack.
I’m always on the fringes of these things.
“Hey, just following up on my invoice,” I send an email; you finally respond and tell me to contact your accountant. And it takes me 6 more months after that, and exactly a year from the day we met, to get paid. When the direct deposit finally hits, I buy myself this used Loro Piana bag from The RealReal.
And then a Smith’s song comes on, and the lyrics remind me of you:
Why pamper life’s complexity
When the leather runs smooth
On the passenger seat?
