After a certain level of cleanliness, the more effort someone puts into their appearance, the less respect I have for them. I have tried to look past this in some situations, but I cant help but think they're lying to me in some way.
I've adopted a heuristic of looking for the worst dressed guy to identify the decision maker when meeting new client groups in my line of work.
If the way one dresses, or the cost of one's watch, or the firmness of one's handshake is the best signal they have to communicate their stature to a group, it's because they don't have anything more tangible.
What other ways are there to communicate stature to a group? For one-on-one interactions there are lots of ways, but when you walk into a room, appearance is about all you have.
I can't help thinking of the recent news articles about Patagonia reacting to the popularity of its fleece vests:
https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-investors-lov...
"I think one reason for the popularity is: Patagonia represents quality without being pretentious"
...so all the rich people wear the same thing in order to not look like rich people, but now it's a stereotype.
I don't think I put much more or less effort in my appearance than someone who's everyday attire includes button up shirts and designer eyewear, but we will signal different interests with the way we dress. They say to dress for the job you want. It could be that you don't actually base your respect on the effort someone puts in their appearance, but rather the kind of appearance you value.
I don't feel the same as OP, but to say that people are putting in the same effort seems off.
Then I also temper myself to realize that work isn't all of a person's life, and I also spend a great deal of time in non-productive pursuits that aren't help to me at work.
Working all the time at all costs isn't healthy. It reminds me to go out and take a walk, or a sculpture class or something.
I think this association is believed to be true more than the evidence supports, helped in no small part by companies which profit from employees donating unpaid overtime to the bottom line. You need to put some time in but diminishing returns set in pretty quickly, and creative work often significantly benefits from a balanced lifestyle.
Why not?
I always try to tackle big challenges at work, switching teams / companies when finding challenges becomes the challenge. Hands-on learning 9-5 is enough to maintain my personal maximum sustainable career growth - any more would lead to burn out.
Commute jogging (10mi/day) and weights at the gym takes 2h/day.
That leaves another 6 hours/day for happy hour, cooking, movies, guitar... excluding all the free time of weekends.
What are you doing with all that time?
> What are you doing with all that time?
Working! Why are you spending all that time screwing around? You've just told me you have another 10 hours a week you can be working that you use exercising. And another 30 hours a week you spend watching movies and playing guitar! That's like a whole other full-time job you could be putting into work! (for the record I'm being very sarcastic)
In responding to dec0dedab0de's original comment, I agreed that I share his superficial feelings -- but I don't think those feeling are right. My point is that while for some people like myself, grinding as hard as possible as long as possible, is both natural and not healthy. For some people, work is not naturally the thing they spend all their time on, and they gravitate to other things as soon as the clock hits 8 hours for the day.
For people such as myself, my natural tendencies to overwork can, at times, unfairly extend to other people and I often have to resist the temptation to think that they should be doing the same as me -- and if they aren't that they aren't putting in 100%.
These are very unhealthy thought processes and one that I personally have to spend time, effort and discipline to temper. The problem is, for me, work is fun.
On the flip-side I've also really worked with people who become incredibly unreliable at work (during normal work hours) while they train for <sporting event> and it's absolutely intolerable. I also say this as somebody who intensely pursued a sporting activity very heavily in my younger years at about 20-25 hours a week. People really minimize the amount of time they spend doing these things.
And to dec0dedab0de's original point, I've also worked with people of impossibly limited technical capability who fly up the corporate ladder, often to disaster, because they have good looks and dress well.
Generally related to this thread I got more into fashion once finishing school and having money come in. This comedy podcast served as an introduction to the world https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/barstool-sports/failing-upw...
My larger critique of appearance-minding is how manifestly classist it is: certain (expensive) clothes and appearances must be worn in certain places and social circles to identify your belonging. Lots of people are screened out by this filter alone. And time and money is wasted on appearance.
It's also ironic that, among a certain set, whose profound knowledge and skills are so vast and impressive that they deserve massive compensation for their time (I'm looking over at the C-suite here), there is still plenty of time and energy available to focus on appearance: clothes, shoes, cars, hairstyles. All vapid things. Vaporware. Hmmm.
Are you really saying this is specific to the last 50-100 years?
Once past that stage, fashion seems to fall into two categories - 1) the selfish need/desire to impress others of similar social class (or a class you wish to join) or 2) the genuine unselfish desire to look nice for your friends benefit in some social situation.