corporalagumbo

2) Ultimately everything, including human behaviour, boils down to the principles of fundamental physics. Human behaviour is just the most complex expresion of these principles of which we are aware.

3) I mostly jumped on the hint of social constructionism because I absolutely hate it when people try to argue that beauty and aesthetic standards are purely constructed and hence artifical or arbitrary, which is patently not true. It's driven by a misguided desire to defend ugly people or something, I don't know, anyone it's stupid. Again I recommend Steven Pinker, his book The Blank Slate also touches on this I believe.

4) Mostly though I wanted to offer some logical reasons why people on online games might tend to wish to present themselves as, for men, muscular, strong, dominant figures, and for women, attractive, assertive, desirable figures.

And then, yes, on top of those there is a whole conflicting mess of different desirable appearances which depend upon the period, culture, and person, driven by all the complexities of interacting human beings. But those factors can be boiled down to some fairly simple drives which have all emerged for one reason: to maximise reproductive success.

Which is all what you would expect from the result of selection pressures acting across tens of thousands of successful generations of descendants of ancient DNA-replicating machines.

Another way to say this is that it is in our nature to be highly responsive to environmental conditions, i.e. nurture. Nature builds the platform and tools needed for nurture to occur - but just because we are plastic in the face of nurture does not mean nurture negates or transcends the principles of nature (at least not so far, I believe.) If individuals had arisen in which this was so, they would have been selected against. You should read The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker makes this point about people who try and argue that the brain is effectively infinitely plastic and comes with no built-in "software" for processing and generating language.

(PS The main complication in trying to read human behaviour for evolutionary logic is that selection principles do not act upon individuals solely, because humans are all integrated into often multiple kin and common-identity networks of greater or lesser complexity. Evolutionary logic resolves at the level of these more-complicated networks.)

(PPS I believe that the head size-hip ratio theory is erroneous. Read http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2012/08/timing-of-c...)

a company that isn't willing to reward those efforts.

What I'm talking about is not some sort of self-sacrifice, selling yourself into corporate slavery. It's the basics of what I would look for in an employee - is he going to work hard, do it without complaining - is he going to make my life easier or harder? Unfortunately people with a notably entitled what's-in-it-for-me attitude only make employer's lives more difficult.

Not saying that that's for sure what this guy was like btw, but that's the impression I get.

Ugh, social construction theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_aesthetics

I'm still pretty young and I often either genuinely come across as or play up a little an appearance of being incompetent and bewildered when I'm interacting with older, female shop assistants and office clerks in retail or bureaucratic environments. They like it, though they wouldn't necessarily admit it, and I get treated with faux-grumpy generosity. Works for me!

Raw talent is just one factor in finding good employees. A successful company requires well-rounded individuals, or a strong structure if you're going to successfully incorporate poorly-rounded individuals. Everyone in a company has to work together in a team in some fashion.

(I usually edit most of my comments here multiple times: written and posted hastily, then subjected to extended consideration.)

Edit: just realised I'm in the process of doing basically the same thing with discovering and standardising my favourite haircut.

Citation?

Re: McDonalds, what's wrong with that? It's not glamorous but it's a solid job which teaches good skills. People need to start somewhere, people from poverty may have no experience with the very most basic financial and life-skills you take for granted: managing expenditure, keeping income regular, putting aside spare cash, staying in one job. Those are the basics people need to learn, and the idea is that someone from poverty who succeeds at that stage can pass on the benefits they gain to their children, who will do even better. Then in a generation or two more they can become a university-educated family.

Seriously, the freedom to enjoy success and the autonomy to use one's own money and run one's own business however one sees fit, within the limits of the law, are like the fundamental principles of capitalism and basically the key to all modern economic and technological progress...

Keep reading though, and keep thinking. You'll get through it soon enough. In the meantime, try to find things worth appreciating. See the good in what people are doing. Go into a big box store, and instead of thinking "look at all this disgusting consumerism sucking up natural resources and destroying the world!" try thinking "wow, isn't it great we've managed to develop such efficient and powerful technologies that we can provide such a dizzying array of products for so cheap to so many people? And isn't it great that our society is so open and undiscriminating that we let anyone buy whatever they want, if they have the money?"

You can do that for as long as you want. Ain't gunna do anything except tire you out. Eventually though you can accept the place you started in the river, and let the current take you down-stream. That's when you start living - when you accept the limitations of how you started in life and open yourself up to your own unique possibilities of your life adventure.

Also, my dad was 42 when he started university. He became a lawyer. Granted, university in my country was cheap at the time, and granted, he would be more comfortable now if he'd started earlier. But he made a good start, and it was better than sitting around and resigning himself to being unqualified.

On that note, I want to stress: it is never too late to re-qualify. And it's always worth it. Don't be embarrassed, don't come up with reasons why you'd never be successful - just go for it. Give it a shot. It'll work out in the end.

Also, not using facebook is difficult to imagine for me. It's pretty baked in to my life.