> What matters more than anything now are your looks. "Queer Eye" does a great job of demonstrating the impact of self-care on looks; aka; that a lot more is p

> What matters more than anything now are your looks. "Queer Eye" does a great job of demonstrating the impact of self-care on looks; aka; that a lot more is possible with what you're born with than you might be thinking. There's a great quote from one of the clients that I can't find, that's something along the lines of "showed me what was possible if I just cared." If you feel like you're doing that, and still unhappy / unsuccessful, you might be https://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_gordon_levitt_how_craving_attention_makes_you_less_creative https://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_gordon_levitt_how_craving_a... What I'm thinking now with this is that phrases like "trying too hard" and "just be yourself" are saying is that rather than try to do actions to cause some outcome, you need another level of indirection: do actions that express your inner self, and then adjust (aka, work on) that inner self until the outcomes of that expression are what you're after. It's like, I don't know, skipping leg day, or eating a balanced meal: you're a system, and to modify a system you have to approach it holistically. Anecdotally, this is working for me (as much as I can actually assign causality). Recently, within a specific but repeating and thus suited for experimentation context, my "dating" life did a ridiculous 180. Most of what I did with my looks was keep the beard a lot more trimmed (theory: this way it can look taken care of) and have been doing a sort of mixed coached yoga / PT thing that's had a subtle but positive impact on my physique. The _other_ major change was my vibe, but that's a lot harder to describe; suffice to say "go to talk therapy." So either not a lot of appearance-based self-care / improvement had a massive impact, and/or a lot of emotional self-care had a huge impact. That all said, I am not expressing agreement with your thesis; I am only expressing my own experience with impacting my dating life through long-term self-care.