Summary of Chapter 8: "The Social Self of Glamorous"

You might have seen the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's in which the main actress attempts to inject meaning and sense of mystery into her life by pretending to live a life that is glamorous. This is a very poignant picture of what many people do in our culture today. Glamour has become a way that ordinary people try to capture that sense of mystery. Celebrity worship, fashion magazines, and luxury goods all offer people the chance to take on the Glamorous public self. Having culturally lost a sense of the sacred, we grasp at what seems the closest replica of mystery and transcendence. We fall into the trap of worshipping the creation instead of the Creator.

I was speaking at a church service about faith and young adults when I was approached by some young women in their twenties who asked me why there were no eligible guys left in the church. I looked around and spotted a guy who looked the same age as them. He was over six feet tall, well built, and handsome. He stood talking to a friend in a casual stance. He was probably the hippest-dressed guy in the room. I nodded toward him and said to the girls, "What about him? Is he single?". They rolled their eyes at each other and said, "Yes, he is single - but no way." I said, "What? Are you kidding me - this guy is single? He looks like a male model!" One of the girls replied, "Yeah, but he does not know who he is." Despite the fact that he fulfilled all of the requirements for being attractive in our culture, his lack of self-awareness meant that he also lacked that indescribable quality that the term cool encompasses.

Our culture's obsession with the concept of sexy and cool goes beyond any addiction to sex or consumerism. On one hand, these concepts represent a diminishment of our humanity. Instead of moving us toward our true selves, they move us away from ourselves. On the other hand, both concepts attempt to capture a sense of self that our culture has forgotten. When we encounter someone with a special indefinable quality that we find intriguing, that person elicits a reaction in us that reveals that something else is going on. We use the purest senses of the words sexy and cool and glamorous to describe this mystery, this unknowability, this transcendence that we occasionally sense in people.

Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p.74-77