Vanity - Tough one to get rid of

The dictionary defines vanity as below
Vanity: inflated pride in oneself
Obsession with one's appearance/personality

For the first time in my life i have been forced to enter the gymnasium. I have resisted it for 26 years but now this bulging belly of mine has forced the sluggish me also to go through the amazingly mundane ordeal of running on a tread mill.

Yesterday while running on it i was thinking if on Day 1 in the gymnasium, everyone is told that no matter what you do you are not going to look any better, only thing you gain is that you are going to be healthy. I bet 70% of the people will quit.
The only motivation is to look better

Its that obsession with having skateboard abs and bulging muscles that drives people to exercising.
And its not just exercise, I have seen people obsessed with appearance, clothes, accessories etc etc.
I mean I know that clothes add to your personality and they leave an impression on the other person.
But I mean why this obsession, there is more to each one of us than just the way we look or dress up.

How many of us try to spend time to make us a better person?
How many of us spend time in introspection and soul searching?
How many of us spend time to think what wrong we did or how we hurt other people so as not to repeat that?

But give us a chance to shop for clothes and we will spend an entire weekend doing that and we will take pride in the number of hours we spent in the gymnasium.

I have used words "we" and "us" through out the article just to ensure that the reader knows I am one of the brigade
I am vain but not in the ways mentioned above.
My vanity lies in different things like
a) Thinking that i am a wisecrack.
b) Thinking that i know about certain things more than others
c) Thinking that i can do certain things better than others

And each one of us in their own way have their vain points (made to rhyme deliberately with pain points).

At the end of the day I would like to be someone who is totally deprived of vanity. I would like to have pride in the fact that there is nothing I am proud about.

But then I think its vanity which drives us also.
It constantly urges us to be better than others.

The trick here is in striking the balance, constantly trying to be better in whichever way you want to be without feeling proud about it.

Enough of a lecture this one, hope that the next blog is a bit of fun:)