The other day I found myself thinking about body types.
Specifically, I was thinking about how much the cultural ideal seems to have shifted over the last decade. Growing up through the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, the dominant message was clear: thinner was better. The ideal body wasn’t simply healthy—it was often impossibly lean. Wealth and success seemed to be communicated through restraint. If you had money, you ate less, hired a trainer, joined a gym, and perhaps embraced a few questionable lifestyle choices along the way.
Today, the landscape feels different.
While extreme thinness still exists as an ideal in some circles, there seems to be a broader appreciation for bodies that look healthy, strong, substantial, and alive. As someone who has always found that more appealing, I’ve enjoyed seeing the shift. But it also made me curious. Why now?
My first thought was historical. There have been periods throughout history where fuller bodies were considered beautiful because they signaled abundance. In a world where food scarcity was common, carrying extra weight suggested prosperity, health, and status. It was a visible indicator that you were thriving while others struggled.
That led me to wonder whether our current economic climate might be creating a similar dynamic. As more people find themselves squeezed financially, as housing becomes less attainable and economic anxiety becomes more common, perhaps our standards of attractiveness are once again responding to conditions beneath the surface. Maybe beauty standards are less about beauty and more about what a culture lacks.
The more I sat with the idea, however, the more complicated it became.
Today’s ideal isn’t necessarily larger. It’s often stronger. Healthier. More resilient. The attraction seems less focused on abundance and more focused on vitality. In a culture that often feels exhausted, disconnected, and over-optimized, perhaps what we’re really longing for is evidence of life itself.
And that’s when the conversation took one of those turns I have come to love.
What if beauty standards are mirrors?
A society worried about starvation admires abundance. A society drowning in abundance admires restraint. A society obsessed with productivity admires optimization. A society exhausted by optimization begins admiring authenticity.
The ideal changes because the wound changes.
Once I saw that pattern, it became difficult to stop seeing it everywhere. Art, fashion, politics, spirituality, relationships—so many things we consider personal seem to emerge from larger currents moving through us.
This realization can feel unsettling at first.
We like to think of our preferences as entirely our own. We imagine ourselves standing outside history, independently deciding what we find beautiful, meaningful, or desirable. But the deeper I look, the more it seems that we are participants in a conversation much larger than ourselves.
The culture shapes the individual. The individual shapes the culture. The mirror reflects the observer. The observer changes because of the reflection. The process loops endlessly.
And then, as often happens, the conversation drifted toward determinism.
If our preferences are shaped by culture, and culture is shaped by economic conditions, and economic conditions emerge from prior causes, where exactly does the independent author enter the story?
For me, this isn’t a depressing question. Quite the opposite.
Many people hear determinism and conclude that nothing matters because free will is an illusion. I’ve always found myself arriving somewhere else.
If the script is already written, then perhaps what remains is not authorship but participation.
The hug from your child still matters. The painting still matters. The friendship still matters. The laughter still matters.
Not despite inevitability, but because of it.
From this perspective, life begins to resemble a great play. The actors are so immersed in their roles that they forget they are acting. They experience every triumph and heartbreak as if it were happening for the first time. And yet, every so often, something cracks open. A moment of meditation. A work of art. A conversation with a friend. A sudden insight while washing dishes.
For just a moment, the actor remembers the stage.
Not enough to leave the play.
Just enough to appreciate it.
Perhaps that’s what consciousness is doing. Perhaps the universe writes a script, forgets it wrote the script, becomes billions of actors, and then spends billions of years trying to remember what it is.
And maybe beauty standards, paintings, philosophy, economics, and even this essay are all part of that remembering.
The strange thing is that I began this line of thought wondering why larger bodies seem more attractive than they once did.
I ended up wondering why anything seems attractive at all.
Sometimes the most interesting journeys begin with the smallest observations.
Follow the thread long enough and you may discover it was connected to everything from the start.