Do you wanna look hot or do you wanna look cool?
Plus a perfect gift that costs ~nothing, home-enswaggening light switches & more unbeatable recon
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Wow. In today’s Plane we’ve got:
Looking hot vs. looking cool
A perfect gift to give a Mach 3+ person if you are also Mach 3+, and it costs ~nothing
Are non-dope light switches quietly sapping the joy from your home? Check out these home-enswaggening switches.
Excellent new music from a gifted chune god,
And more unbeatable recon!
Let’s get to it —
The other day we got a compelling reader question from a Spyfriend about 😮💨 swag as relates to 🥵 sex appeal…
“How do you consider looking cool vs looking hot?” — ryscottcam
For my part, I love hot people, deeply, but hotness is not foremost in my mind when I personally think about which clothes to wear. It has never (well, rarely ever) been.
I’ve long aimed to look good in clothes and — as this reader anticipates — I’ve aimed to look cool in them. But while “looking good” and “looking cool” can, under the right circumstances, bleed into “looking hot,” the relationship between them is never 1:1:1.
The hottest I ever look might well be when I am not thinking about clothes at all, e.g., when I climb a ladder up to our roof in some old jeans, a thrashed t-shirt, and hiking boots, and put in some f--king work cleaning our gutters.
The closest I come to a more-routinized relationship to hotness is: For several years now, in addition to riding a bike and hiking, I’ve been on a very light daily “strength-building” regimen where I alternate between sets of push-ups, bicep curls, military presses, squats, sit-ups, lateral dumbbell raises, and kettlebell rows.
I do this because it feels good, it’s a nice way to break up a day otherwise spent writing and because I’m motivated by a not-unvain sense that I will be more fit, ipso facto look more fit, and ipso facto look perhaps subliminally hotter while looking cool in cool clothes.
While I never try to “dress hot,” more power to you if you do. However, while hotness is wonderful, it is not the end-all, be-all when it comes to how you look.
Consider these variables…
As I see it, someone could theoretically look beautiful, hot and well-dressed — bless their souls. Someone could look hot and badly dressed, which, hey, it could be worse, though I think their bad-dressedness will likely diminish their hotness.
Someone can look beautiful, well-dressed, cool, chill, and not hot. Hardly a tragedy. Someone might look cool, well-dressed, and vibey. That is very tight. Someone else might look vibey, chill and, though not hot, like a lil cutie pie. Also tight.
I don’t think it’s possible to be both busted and well-dressed, because the well-dressedness will recuperate, re-articulate and transfigure the bustedness. It is, vexingly, possible to look well-dressed yet wack. And so on. (The graph above does not include traits such as “funny” or “intelligent” or “kind” or “charming,” which are important but not readily apparent on a first look, and this is a graph about appearance.)
On a typical day, I guess I go for a combination of well-dressed, cool, chill, vibey, and handsome. In the darkest hour of a very bad day I might feel busted and badly dressed, while in the magic hour of a very good day I will feel the light of god shine from within myself and know that I am beautiful. If I’ve spent the day sharing moments of tenderness & laughter with loved ones and/or doing more push-ups than I have ever done before, I might look a wee bit hot — or like a lil cutie pie.
These categories are, fascinatingly and liberatingly, in flux. Some great news for you is that, by definition, no one in Spy Nation is wack nor busted.
Meanwhile —
Erin just received a perfect gift. It probably did not cost much in terms of actual money, but it definitely cost the equivalent of $1,000 minimum in coolness and ingenuity: