Vanity behaves just like a drug addiction. Consider one of my students, when she makes a comment about body shaming, adds “I’m actually a model,” and waits for everyone to look impressed.

College Barbie’s always looking for a fix.

Some of us can’t enjoy just one compliment, all by itself. Immediately, we start anticipating the next one. If it doesn’t arrive soon enough, we’ll go in pursuit. We’ll start posting five selfies a day. Make little comments about ourselves and hope people validate them.

Or even worse, we’ll start criticizing ourselves in public and praying for someone to step in. “Gosh, look at the muffin top on these jeans.” But there’s no muffin top. We just want a compliment.

Or there is a muffin top, and we still want a compliment.

If that doesn’t work, we’ll shop for new clothes, or different makeup and hair products. We become prime targets for beauty dealers.

I mean, consultants.

The rest of us blame vain people for the way they act. True, it’s irritating when some friend or coworker goes on and on about their looks. Their intellect. Their talent. Especially if they’re actually pretty, smart, or talented. That’s when we judge them the most.

Either way, we need help — those of us depending on external validation. The kind that can’t always come from friends. Because let’s face it, we don’t want our friends to tell us we have a problem.

It’s on us to be honest with ourselves. The world of Victoria’s Secret and Maxim has done a number on the self esteem of men and women alike. We can’t count on them to cure our vanity, though.

Attention only creates a need for more. That beautiful friend you can’t stand isn’t just vain. She’s a beauty junkie, who might even need some help.

We wonder if they’ll ever be satisfied. If they’ll ever get enough attention. The answer is no. They don’t get enough. And they never will.

Because attention only creates a need for more. Your friend isn’t just vain. She’s a junkie, and she might even need your help.

I’ll never forget my first hit, standing in line for a roller coaster at the age of 14. My friends told me, “Those guys behind us have been staring at you for fifteen minutes straight.”

What a rush.

It’s the kind of high that can form an addiction. The kind that ranks right up there with cigarettes, booze, and weed. Lucky for me, psychopaths don’t form addictions like other people. (Or so the latest research says.)

We love to judge vanity. It’s easy to make fun of someone who can’t stop praising themselves. And yet underneath vanity lies a deep insecurity that’s not so funny.

A loose friend of mine from grad school practically lived off the high of vanity. In her defense, she was gorgeous. Instagram caliber. She was smart, but clearly prized her appearance above everything else.

In some ways, her life was sad. Her friends and family didn’t take her seriously. Neither did her husband. We also never fully accepted her. Not just because of her attitude, but our own biases. To us, she was a trophy wife who’d decided to get a doctorate out of boredom.

We love to judge vanity. It’s easy to make fun of someone who can’t stop praising themselves. And yet underneath vanity lies a deep insecurity that’s not so funny.

She especially enjoyed predicting how many men would harass her on a given weekend. As if she were couching her vanity in a complaint, but secretly looking forward to it. Her ambivalence was the kind that the incel and red pill movements exploit to justify their abuse of women.

One time she said, “I wonder how many catcalls I’m going to get in this dress. Can you even imagine?”

And I answered, “We’re at a conference, so hopefully not many.”

That’s right, a conference. An expensive one. The kind where you network like hell, and try to present yourself as a professional at all times. Yet she could only focus on the prospects of male attention.

That day, she went to one panel and spent the rest of her time flirting in the lobby and ordering overpriced lattes. Not mutually exclusive, of course. When several of us grabbed lunch to catch up and compare notes, she talked about various compliments she’d received from men.

At the time, I thought — wow, here’s someone who’s internalized every gender norm, every form of sexism.

If you literally can’t conform to social norms and expectations, you luck out of them. You might deal with them as external obstacles. But you never ingest the poison.

My friend irritated most of us. We’d gone into academia to escape the toxins of mainstream culture. It suited me well. My smile sucks, and my personality comes off as terse, almost cold (at least to strangers). No modeling career for me. But I can lecture on obscure topics for hours.

Later on, I started to realize the full meaning of my friend’s behavior at that conference. My odd blend of autism and psychopathy may have saved me from the pressure that so many others succumb to.

If you literally can’t conform to social norms and expectations, you luck out of them. You might deal with them as external obstacles. But you never ingest the poison. Meanwhile, everyone else develops an addiction. To beauty. To intellect. Or to ego.

It was a good thing I wasn’t as pretty as my friend. My flaws had saved me.

Maybe American culture had made my friend this way by providing the absolute wrong incentives. Rewarding her for toxic behaviors, essentially training her to value her looks and nothing else. Hence, her brain treats conferences and dance clubs the same way.

That trip taught me something else. It was a good thing I wasn’t as pretty as her. My flaws had saved my ass. If I’d been able to smile on cue and flirt, imagine what might’ve happened to me.

Our culture has turned beauty into a narcotic, and it’s ruining us.

Our brains thrive on instant reward. The kind of easy fix that comes to “pretty people” can lead them astray. They’ll pass up the delayed gratification of research projects and advanced degrees. They’ll acclimate to the kind of attention they get most.

It doesn’t mean they’re dumb, or lazy. They’ve just been ruined by a culture that’s turned beauty into a narcotic.

There’s nothing wrong with beauty. Look at the photograph I chose. From the girl to the clouds in the background, it’s beautiful. Every day, it gets a little harder to appreciate beauty for its own sake.

We want everyone to embrace every aspect of themselves. Everyone has a face, a body, and a mind to develop.

Beauty is something we can enjoy in ourselves and others. Not something we shoot up with after a hard day. Ultimately, that’s vanity —abuse of beauty, a learned behavior that hurts the user most.