Self-value

Those constant Zoom calls and Google Meets are fundamentally altering how individuals perceive their facial appearance. A study shows that people spending more time staring at their digital reflections than the actual speaker. In addition, thanks to appearance-enhancing filters, they’re finding themselves more likely to consider cosmetic procedures as a result.

Much like staring into a mirror for extended periods, spending hours on video calls has created a new form of self-scrutiny. Platform features like “touch-up my appearance” filters, which provide an airbrushed effect, might amplify this effect by presenting users with an idealized version of themselves. This phenomenon shares similarities with ‘Snapchat dysmorphia,’ where people seek surgical changes to replicate their filtered images.

Survey results show that nearly 89% used videoconferencing platforms more than three days per week. Perhaps more tellingly, 68% reported using appearance-enhancing filters more than half the time during their calls. 66% of participants admitted to focusing more on their own image than on the speaker or presented material during video meetings.

Most striking was the connection between self-viewing behavior and cosmetic procedure interest. Among those who frequently watched themselves during video calls, over 80% expressed interest in cosmetic treatments. Popular procedures under consideration included chemical peels, fat reduction, laser treatments, surgical reconstruction, dermal fillers, and neuromodulators like Botox.

Eight in ten Americans agree society puts too much value on appearing youthful. A survey examined perspectives around aging and found that most agree that in today’s world there’s a negative bias around aging or the perception of being old—so much so that six in ten avoid sharing their age for fear of being “judged.”

But a new poll also identified the benefits of getting older. 75% of the respondents agreed that age is not something to fight or fear, but rather an opportunity to live a more fulfilling and emotionally healthy life. Two-thirds of respondents actually feel younger than they are—nearly a decade younger, on average.

The survey found that three in four people want to spend less time fighting aging and more time doing things they love. Jim Burkett, president of Great Lakes Wellness said, “While ‘anti-aging’ has become the norm for quite some time, we’re starting to see a shift among Americans who realize aging is living.”

The Top Four Benefits of Aging:

–Learning new things about themselves or the world every year

–Having more life experience

–Gaining wisdom

–Being more confident

What, then, is the secret to living well in your advancing years? 80% will tell you that a better attitude leads to more graceful aging. 70% said they’re embracing their age, believing that getting older is not as bad as they thought it would be.

For most of us, the older we get, the more we slow down physically. But for some, growing old also means slowing down socially—so much to the point that some home-bodied seniors go days with little to no human interaction.

A new survey sheds light on this sad, but true effect of aging, noting that hundreds of thousands of people often go a week without speaking to a single person.

According to the survey of 1,896 seniors over 65 in the United Kingdom, more than one in five (22%) will have a conversation with no more than just three people over the span of an entire week. That translates to nearly 2.6 million elderly folks who don’t enjoy regular human contact on a daily basis. Perhaps most alarming though is researchers say 225,000 individuals will go a week without talking to anyone face-to-face.

Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK says, “Loneliness is a huge problem because retirement, bereavement and ill health mean many older people find they are spending a lot less time enjoying the company of others than they’d like. Loneliness can affect your health, your wellbeing and the way you see yourself – it can make you feel invisible and forgotten.”

About 40% of seniors say they’d feel more confident to head out each day if they knew their neighbors. Just the thought of someone stopping to chat with them brightens their outlook. Half of respondents agree that even a short conversation with a neighbor or acquaintance would greatly improve their day overall. And a quarter of older adults say it makes them feel good when someone smiles or acknowledges them while waiting in line at places like the bank or grocery store. One in five would be thrilled if someone stopped to ask them how their day had gone.

Christian Coleman is the reigning world champion in the men’s 100 meters. From time to time, strangers approach the 26-year-old Atlanta native with a proposition. He said, “People will look at me, like, ‘You’re Christian Coleman. Hey, you want to race?’ And I mean, like, we’re in the middle of the mall. It’s like, obviously not.”

It’s a remarkably common occurrence, top sprinters say. Against all odds, overconfident average citizens size up these singularly skilled and sculpted specimens and think they have a chance to win. The urge appears to be universal, spanning national boundaries and identities.

Karsten Warholm, the 26-year-old world record holder in the 400-meter hurdles, works out at an indoor public facility in Oslo, in his native Norway. Mr. Warholm recalled a training session when a man, not dressed in running clothes, asked him to race.

Mr. Warholm said, “I was like, ‘Sure,’ because I was going to do another run either way. Of course, I smoked him, obviously.” At the finish line, the man insisted he had a bad start. He wanted to race again, Mr. Warholm recalled, chuckling.

There seems to be a trend for artisanal products—coffee shops, bakeries, and the like. Some may not know what artisanal means, other than assuming it meant (in the case of the bakery) "misshapen and expensive." But it actually means "traditional" and "nonmechanically made." A person made it, not a machine. It may have some imperfections, but even those are proof of authenticity.

Similarly, we human beings are not the product of a factory or the process of copy-and-paste. Our distinctive physical individual­ity is intended. We have been made by the ultimate artisan. Our God has produced billions of human bodies, but we are not mass-produced. We've each been handcrafted with infinite care. David says we have been "knitted together" in our mother's womb. Now, even if you have never knitted a stitch of anything in your life, you have probably watched others. It is wonderfully hands-on with each and every stitch individually knit by hand.

Being handcrafted means none of us has come about by accident. Our body is not random or arbitrary. We may know people who were not planned by their parents, which is a sensitive issue indeed. They were an "accident," a surprise, and some who are aware of their origins can struggle with long-term relational insecurity.

But when it comes to God, no one is unplanned. Every one of us is the product of God's deliberate choice. However, many people there turn out to be in the whole of human history, not one of them will have been an accident.

The Bible doesn't just affirm that we are all, in some way, the result of God's work. It says much more than that. We are the product of God's intention. He purposed our bodies. They are what he intended them to be. We can affirm, as David does, even of these imperfect bodies, that God made them as he intended.

Sam Allberry writes in his most recent book:

I’ve recently been setting up a new home and therefore spending more time than I would ever choose trying to assemble furniture. If I never see another Allen key for the rest of my life, I will be a very happy man. Needless to say, the results have not been uniformly impressive. The best appraisal I can give myself at the end of a sweaty day is, "That'll just have to do." And when you're talking about a bed that you'll be spending around a third of your life lying on, "that'll have to do" is not great. I already seem to have done my back in as a result of it.

With God it is very different. There is a rhythm to the account of creation in Genesis 1. The work takes place over six days, with a repeated refrain: "God saw that it was good." God is evidently not inattentive to what he is making. He doesn't start one aspect of creation and then turn his attention to the next project. He finishes each act, steps back (as it were) and appraises it. As he assesses each day's work of creation, he is fully pleased with the outcome. So again and again we read, "It was good," "It was good," "It was good."

That is, until we turn up. At the end of the day when God has made humanity in his image, male and female, he says something different: "It was very good" (Gen. 1:31). The difference male and female image bearers makes to his creation is to lift it from "good" to "very good." Needless to say, it is not a track record we maintain through the rest of the Bible; but the fact remains, there is a deep fundamental very-goodness to the way God has designed us to be, and our being made as men and women is at the heart of it.

A recent interview with actress Maria Fabriela de Faria, in Global Heroes from The Wall Street Journal, perfectly reveals our culture of self-centered individualism.

When asked, “What is one good choice that everyone can make to improve the world around them?” She answered, “Look for your own truth, LIVE your own truth instead of repeating anyone else’s.” She explained: “What’s crucial to me is to make my audience . . . [question] old beliefs.” She counsels her fans to engage in a daily practice of asking, “What do I need today?” because “the only person who will know what works for you, is you.”

Actor and director Justine Bateman has never gone under the knife and never will. The 55-year-old Family Ties actress is so perplexed by society’s acceptance of plastic surgery that she has penned a new book, Face: One Square Foot of Skin, in which she explores the idea of getting some work done. She says,

Why is the idea that women’s older faces are undesirable, what is the root of all that? How did we get to this point in our current society where cutting your face up, or injecting it, or inserting plastic or whatever, is spoken about so matter-of-factly?

We went from, “Wow someone getting a face lift is quite unusual!” to, “It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.” To me it’s really, it’s like, psychopathic. It’s lunacy, and I don’t like that we’re going along with it without pausing to think about it.

The reporter said, “What struck me in reading Bateman’s book was how much time we spend fretting about whether we should do something about our faces or hold out. And I don’t just mean older women. I have friends in their 20s who also fall into a vortex of products that promise to reverse aging that isn’t even visible yet. The Instagram generation hasn’t been spared, in fact, they may have accumulated more time examining their faces than any before them.”

Robert X Cringely, in his book Accidental Empires, tells about the early days of Apple. In the late 1970’s, Apple had grown beyond the point that all the employees knew each other on sight. So, it was decided that, like grown-up companies, they should all have name badges.

As is the corporate way, it was deemed that these badges should be numbered and, as corporate lore decrees, the number assigned would be based on the order in which employees had joined the company.

Cringely writes:

Steve Wozniak was declared employee number 1. Steve Jobs was number 2, and so on. Jobs didn’t want to be number 2. He didn’t want to be second in anything. Jobs argued that he, rather than Woz, should have the sacred number one since they were co-founders of the company and J came before W in the alphabet. When that plan was rejected. he argued that the number 0 was still unassigned, and since 0 came before 1, Jobs would be happy to take that number. He got it.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Jesus watched as guests took chairs around a dinner table. Each had tried to elbow into the place of honor, and so he said, “When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him” (Luke 14:7-8).

Country music star Merle Haggard wrote the following lyrics after spending years in and out of prison:

When they let me out of prison, I held my head up high,

Determined I would rise above the shame.

But no matter where I’m living, the black mark follows me,

I'm branded with a number on my name.

The lyrics are the reflections in a hit song recorded by Merle Haggard, titled “Branded Man.”

Devastated by his father’s death when he was still a child, Merle soon got into trouble and stepped into petty crime. He therefore found himself in prison many times, eventually ending up in the dreaded San Quentin Prison.

Through a series of events while in prison, Merle decided to change his lifestyle and took to music. He attributes this decision to a concert held by Johnny Cash at the prison. On being paroled, he took to country music and began to find success.

In 1972, Merle Haggard was granted a full pardon by then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, and never looked back. He went on to become a legend in Country Music.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sadly, we often accept the unkind labels put on us by others and live our lives believing that we have no worth! Whatever people say or think of us, however, what really matters is what God thinks of us. Thankfully, the scriptures show us that God places great value on us, and we need to believe what God says.

Once upon a time there was a frog who lived in the north and wanted to go south for the winter as the swans did. Each year that frog watched the swans fly south while he shivered in the snow and cold. Then he got an idea. He went to the swans and asked to go with them. "You can't fly!" they responded.

"I know," the frog said, "but I have a wonderful idea. Let me get a stick and if two of you will help me, I can go with you. Two of you could keep the ends of the stick in your beaks and I could hang on to the middle of the stick and get out of this miserable cold weather."

So two of his swan friends agreed to help and it worked beautifully for many miles. However as they were flying low over the farmlands of North Carolina, a farmer looked up and saw the frog holding onto the stick. "Look at that!" he shouted to a friend, "That's amazing! Wonder whose idea that was?"

The frog, quite proud of his incredible idea, opened his mouth to tell them. That's when he fell to his death.

Possible Preaching Angles: Author Steve Brown comments on this story: "Pride and self-righteousness are the most dangerous places for a Christian to live."

Os Guinness argues that God can use and has used people in their youth, but God also has accomplished some of his best work through people more advanced in life experience:

It is said that gymnasts are old at twenty, boxers at thirty-five, cricketers and baseball players at forty. Yet doctoral students are old at thirty, while young as professors at thirty-one. Novelists, we are told, do their best work in their twenties and thirties, whereas painters are still young in their forties. Most leaders of the great revivals and awakenings were under the age of thirty, but many of the greatest leaders of nations have been in their eighties. Golda Meir only became prime minister of Israel at the age of eighty.

In short, the way of excellence as well as contentment is to be "our utmost for God's highest" at whatever age we are. Another truth we tend to forget is that many things in life are better with age. The foolishness of the 1960s slogan, "Don't trust anyone over thirty," was upended by Thomas Oden's brilliant quip, "Don't trust anyone under three hundred." When Andras Schaff, the virtuoso Hungarian pianist, played a sixtieth birthday concert in London, he chose to perform Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations." He had waited until he was fifty, he said, to play Beethoven's thirty-two sonatas. And only after he had performed twenty complete cycles of the sonatas would he dare to move on to the "Diabelli Variations." "It's the most wonderful, the most colorful composition Beethoven ever wrote … . I cannot understand pianists who are 20 years old and they immediately play that piece. It cannot be serious." Another pianist, Artur Schnabel, remarked similarly, "Mozart sonatas are 'too easy for children, and too difficult for adults.'"

The Chinese-American Christian leader Russell Jeung explains how his father taught him a profound lesson on the true nature of humility. Due to the maltreatment of many Chinese immigrants in America, Russell's dad taught him to work hard. But he also taught him he should not consider himself better than anyone else, even if successful.

"As the youngest child in my family," Russell explains, "my job at Chinese banquets was to make sure everyone's teacup was kept full. My dad, without fail, reminded me at these meals to be alert to the needs of others. I think he took as much pride in seeing me serve food to dinner guests as he did in seeing me get good grades."

Russell reinforces this concept of humility by pointing to the Chinese characters making up the words for humility—Qiang xun.

"Qiang means to have a yielding spirit, not seeking one's own pride or recognition. It pictures someone speaking while holding shafts of grain together, suggesting that words of humility prioritize the unity and harmony of the group first. Xun is the pictograph of the way a grandchild walks. We are to see ourselves like children, moving and acting in deference to our wiser elders."

In a question and answer period after one of his lectures, C.S. Lewis was asked which of the world's religions gives its followers the greatest happiness. Lewis paused and said, "While it lasts, the religion of worshipping oneself is best."

Possible Preaching Angle: In other words, if you want instant, but very short-term happiness, create a religion that focuses on worshipping you.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, but a study reports self-regard, self-promotion, and plain old bragging are far more prominent in pop music than they were a quarter-century ago. The authors of the study note that, in 1990, blatant bragging was basically confined to rap music. The study analyzed the lyrics of the top 100 songs from the years 1990, 2000, and 2010, as compiled by Billboard magazine. Coders looked for examples of eight categories of self-promotion, including referring to oneself by name and demanding respect.

The study concluded:

Compared with earlier years, songs in 2010 were more likely to include the singer referring to the self by name, general self-promotion, and bragging about wealth, partner's appearance, or sexual prowess. A similar, albeit nonsignificant increase, was also seen for bragging about musical prowess and demands for respect.

The researchers added a warning:

Music both reflects and influences the values of the culture. The hit songs we listen to "both represent the increasing individualistic/narcissistic tendencies in the culture, but also further convey that promoting oneself through bragging, demands for respect, and self-focus is acceptable … [Therefore], parents, educators, and those responsible for policy should consider how strongly individualistic messages influence young people and work to provide messages and opportunities that also advocate communal values.

Possible Preaching Angles: Although the conclusions to this study seem obvious, the comments from the researchers should challenge parents and churches to provide an alternative to this example of self-promotion.

The average woman in America sees about 3,000 ads each day—many of which send messages about what the "ideal" female body should look like. But 98 percent of American women are not as thin as the fashion models who supposedly have the right body type. The average American woman is 5'4" and weighs 165 pounds. The average Miss America winner is 5'7" and weighs 121 pounds.

It's not surprising, then, that 42 percent of 1st-3rd grade girls want to be thinner. 81 percent of 10-year-old girls are afraid of being fat. 70 percent of 18-30-year-old American women don't like their bodies, and 60 percent of women in middle age still remain unsatisfied with their bodies. 50 percent of girls use unhealthy weight control behaviors, such as skipping meals, vomiting, and taking laxatives. Nearly 20 million women will suffer from an eating disorder at some point in their lives.

Kristin Scott Thomas, the British-born actress who was nominated for an Oscar (The English Patient), talked about the pressure of growing older in a culture that worships youth. In a 2013 interview, the 53-year-old actress said, "When you're my age, you're invariably in a supporting role, so there's often a young woman in her 20s or early 30s who is the lead, and you're constantly put next to them. You're watching yourself get old, on a screen that hides nothing."

She went on to explain how growing older makes her feel increasingly invisible in everyday life:

I'm not talking about in a private setting, at a dinner party or anything. But when you're walking down the street, you get bumped into, people slam doors in your face—they just don't notice you. Somehow, you just vanish. It's a cliché, but men grow in gravitas as they get older, while women just disappear.