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Is Vanity Bad if It Keeps You Fit?

8 min readApr 13, 2023

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An obese man at the beach (CC BY 3.0) via

It’s modern, industrial society’s dirty, open secret. Everyone has gotten fat.

It’s a fact as plain as day. Look around anywhere and it’s readily, unavoidably apparent. Yet no one wants to talk about it. Or if they do, they want to paper it over and adorn it with ribbons.

To someone slim and trim, someone who values being so and who works hard to ensure I remain so, this feels like crazy town. It feels like a society that has fully thrown in the towel, a society that has shamelessly made its peace with utter defeat. And the fatter everyone else becomes, the more being thin feels like being the sole sane inmate in the asylum.

How did it come to this?

There’s a brief section in Jon Stewart’s nineteen-year-old America (The Book) titled “,” where it shows a picture of an enormously obese woman with the caption, “In the future, you will want to ‘tap’ this.”

The accompanying text reads:

Around 2015, Americans will realize it would be much easier to change their standard of beauty than to lose weight. From that point on, we will embrace our indulgent lifestyles. Gyms will close, fad binge books will rule the best-seller…

Free Factor
Free Factor

Published in Free Factor

A place where diverse thinkers can express their unique ideas and takes on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from science and philosophy, to history, politics, and societal critique of all kinds.

Colby Hess
Colby Hess

Written by Colby Hess

Freelance writer, photographer, and explorer of reality. Author of the freethinker children’s book "The Stranger of Wigglesworth."

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