Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
When I came to the US I was struck by the anti-wabi-sabi temporal aesthetics here, revealed especially by car insurance principles, where the goal is to restore a car to brand-new looks regardless of severity of accidents. So well-insured things don’t “age” naturally. They merely start to look unfashionable.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
In the US, you rarely see vehicles that have been roughly patched up to functional levels. You either see underinsured vehicles that look entirely neglected including barely street-legal dangerous damage OR things that are over-maintained by insurance and/or owners paying out of pocket with an eye on resale
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
The funny thing is that Americans unconsciously bring this ethos to self-presentation as well. Not just affect and deportment (which reveals a youthfulness fetish) but more worryingly, ethical postures. So you get 45-50 year-old people with “mint condition” virtue postures I’d expect to see in an 18-year-old
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
It’s like after every messy life event they go their “ideological insurance provider” and patch themselves up to mint condition. Instead of aging with a visible history of cracks and dents that would signal a mellowing and learning, you get virtue postures that look new but unfashionable
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Brad Lee
@bradlee
"Virtue posture": a new way of putting virtue-signal and "posturetalk" together. Is it similar to ideological plastic surgery? Or more like "not acting your age"?
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