A genie appears before you and says you must choose to be very physically attractive, but slightly below average intelligence, or very intelligent, but slightly below average attractiveness? Which would you choose, and why?
A genie appears before you and says you must choose to be very physically attractive, but slightly below average intelligence, or very intelligent, but slightly below average attractiveness? Which would you choose, and why?
Probably smart, because I’m already pretty smart and the prospect of giving up what I already have seems scary.
Plus, I’ve lived most of my life thinking I was repulsively ugly; part of overcoming that anxiety involved understanding that “you can be the juiciest, ripest peach in the world, but some people just don’t like peaches”. If there’s anything I’ve learned from that, it’s understanding that attractiveness is even harder to “objectively” quantify than intelligence
I would rather be beautiful because then I wouldn’t realize everyone else around me is so unfathomably stupid.
My trick to coping with that has been to seek out rooms or contexts in which I’m the stupid one, relatively speaking. I sometimes struggle with insecurity when doing this (especially as a bright kid who was “a big fish in a small pond”), but I never feel happier than when I’m learning from someone knowledgeable and enthusiastic about their little weird slice of the world.