The Proactive Maintenance Paradox
I recently heard CNN interview New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino about the increasingly perfected faces surrounding us—on social media, in celebrity culture and now through artificial intelligence. Her recent essay explores how cosmetic and digital perfection can begin to disturb our relationship with what is recognisably human. Jia Tolentino
Tolentino described something more significant than changing beauty standards. She spoke of a growing “pull away from the human and the physical”: a withdrawal from our actual selves and from the actual selves of other people.
That phrase stayed with me.
What does it mean to pull away from the human?
And what might our growing discomfort with ageing, imperfection and difference reveal about the environments we are creating?
Proactive maintenance
One of the most striking parts of the interview concerned the idea of proactive maintenance.
Cosmetic procedures once associated with responding to visible signs of ageing are increasingly promoted as preventative interventions. The message is no longer simply that ageing can be altered. It is that it should be anticipated and treated before it has properly begun.
A line on a face is no longer necessarily understood as a mark of living or the passage of time. It becomes an early warning sign requiring intervention.
The language of maintenance makes this appear responsible and sensible. We maintain our homes, our cars and our health. Why would we not maintain our faces?
But it made me wonder:
What might happen if we applied the same commitment to proactive maintenance to our behaviours, relationships and communities?
We are becoming increasingly vigilant about the earliest signs of ageing on the individual face.
Are we equally vigilant about the warning signs appearing in how we live together?
Do we respond with the same urgency to growing isolation, diminishing empathy, hostility towards difference, dehumanising language or withdrawal from physical community?
Or have some of these signs become so embedded within everyday life that we no longer recognise them as warnings?
This is the proactive maintenance paradox:
We are learning to intervene earlier and earlier in the ageing of the individual face, while often intervening later and later in the deterioration of our relationships and communities.
Perfection is not neutral
The pursuit of perfection might appear to be a private or superficial concern. However, the image of perfection being created around us is not neutral.
In her earlier essay on “Instagram Face”, Tolentino described how the most visible faces on social media were being drawn towards a remarkably standardised appearance. Filters, cosmetic procedures, algorithms and patterns of digital approval can reinforce particular ideas about which faces are most desirable and worthy of attention. “Instagram Face”
Correction when adding the link in WordPress: the “Instagram Face” anchor should link to Tolentino’s earlier 2019 essay rather than the newer essay. Use this source: The Age of Instagram Face — The New Yorker
These representations do not remain confined to social media.
They become part of the wider visual culture from which artificial-intelligence systems learn. Technology can then reproduce the same assumptions and present them back to us as though they were natural, objective or universal. Tolentino cites a 2024 investigation in which prompts for a “normal woman” produced almost exclusively thin, light-skinned women, while images prompted as “beautiful women” overwhelmingly reproduced youth and thinness. Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare — The New Yorker
The process can become circular:
Repeated representation becomes familiarity.
Familiarity becomes the norm.
The norm becomes embedded within technology.
Technology reproduces and reinforces the norm.
The environment therefore does more than show us what society already values.
It can select, amplify and automate a narrow hierarchy of appearance.
It teaches us not only what perfection is supposed to look like, but also who is positioned furthest away from it.
When difference becomes imperfection
This is where the pull away from the human becomes more troubling.
When a narrow image of perfection is repeatedly positioned as normal, people who differ from it may be perceived not simply as different but as deviations from what is desirable, acceptable or properly human.
The danger is not that Blackness, disability, ageing, cultural difference or other forms of human variation are imperfect.
They are not.
The danger lies in environments that teach us to interpret difference as imperfection.
The progression may be subtle:
perfection becomes the norm
↓
difference becomes deviation
↓
deviation becomes deficiency
↓
deficiency becomes inferiority
↓
inferiority diminishes recognition and empathy
If we become less tolerant of imperfection within ourselves, might we also become less tolerant of difference in others?
If we are continually trained to value what is polished, youthful, predictable and controlled, what happens to our capacity to remain open to people who are unfamiliar, complex, vulnerable or unlike us?
Through the Six Stages Framework, these are not simply questions about attitudes. They invite us to consider how environments may influence movement towards greater recognition and belonging—or towards dismissal, hostility, blame and deeper entrenchment. Six Stages Framework
The pathway below captures this process through the SSF lens:
A warning light
A recent controversy involving a baby-shaped stress-relief doll in China brought these questions into sharp focus.
The toy, known as “Natasha”, became the subject of viral videos in which it was struck, stamped on, pierced, filled with water and otherwise damaged as a form of entertainment or emotional release. Chinese reporting documented concern about the escalation from ordinary play into increasingly violent treatment and the potential normalisation of violence towards an infant-shaped object. Xinhua report on the Natasha doll trend
The racial dimension became particularly troubling because the viral version resembled a dark-skinned Black baby. The controversy subsequently spread internationally, with Black commentators questioning the dehumanising symbolism of turning a Black infant-like body into an object that could be attacked, humiliated and consumed as entertainment. CNA report on the international racial controversy
We should be careful not to make claims that the available evidence cannot support.
There is no verified evidence that the manufacturer deliberately chose a Black face because people would find it easier to strike. Nor can we assume that everyone who participated consciously intended to express racial hostility.
But intention is not the only question.
We can also ask:
What was the environment enabling people to rehearse, reward and normalise?
A representation resembling a Black infant became an object of emotional discharge.
Violence towards it became content.
Content generated attention.
Attention encouraged imitation.
Imitation produced escalation.
The environment did not simply observe behaviour. It helped create the conditions in which that behaviour could become familiar, entertaining and commercially useful.
The controversy raises an unsettling question:
Is there a relationship between who most closely resembles the dominant image of humanity and whose vulnerability most readily activates our empathy and protection?
Whose vulnerability do we recognise?
The issue is not limited to one toy, although very different contexts should not be collapsed into a single explanation.
Adultification bias can result in Black children being perceived as older, more responsible, less innocent and less vulnerable than their white peers. Their need for care and safeguarding may consequently become obscured by assumptions about maturity, culpability or capacity to cope.
The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s 2025 review examined the experiences of 53 Black, Asian and Mixed Heritage children. Its findings included concerns about adultification and the ways race and racism can affect how vulnerability is recognised within safeguarding systems. Race, racism and safeguarding children — GOV.UK
Related questions arise when Black children are disproportionately subjected to school exclusion or stop and search. Are they being encountered first as children requiring understanding and protection—or as problems, risks and potential threats requiring control?
In maternity care, concerns about whether Black women’s pain, knowledge of their own bodies and expressions of vulnerability receive sufficient recognition and urgency raise a similar question.
The UK Government’s 2026 Race Equality Engagement Group report records accounts from women from ethnic-minority backgrounds who felt dismissed, whose concerns were not taken seriously and whose pain was not believed. It also identifies racial stereotyping, poor communication and structural inequality among the issues affecting trust and care. Race Equality Engagement Group: maternal and neonatal care — GOV.UK
The Black doll does not explain these outcomes. Safeguarding, education, policing and healthcare are distinct systems with multiple and complex influences.
But each brings us back to a shared psychological and systemic question:
Whose innocence, pain and vulnerability do our environments teach us to recognise instinctively—and whose do they make easier to doubt, minimise or disregard?
When environments repeatedly present one narrow image as the ideal human, they may influence more than who we consider beautiful.
They may influence whose face appears familiar.
Whose distress we notice.
Whose account we believe.
Whose pain creates urgency.
And whose humanity becomes easier to overlook.
Normalisation as a risk factor
This reflection also reminded me of a recent exchange with an engineer on LinkedIn.
He observed that systems can repeatedly classify recurring pressures as exceptional even after the warning signs have become visible.
My response was that, once warning signs are visible, the deeper question is how the surrounding culture and systems have normalised them to the point that people no longer respond with urgency.
Normalisation can itself become a risk factor.
What initially disturbs us becomes familiar.
What becomes familiar is gradually reclassified as ordinary.
What is treated as ordinary no longer triggers intervention.
The same process may be taking place around:
- constant self-surveillance;
- fear of ageing;
- hostility towards difference;
- withdrawal into controlled digital environments;
- dehumanising humour;
- the treatment of vulnerability as weakness;
- and the transformation of people into images, products and categories.
This is also why the SSF emphasises the importance of recognising movement down the negative axis before harm reaches its most visible or extreme forms. Why Harm Rarely Begins with Extremism: The Psychology of Escalation
The question is no longer simply:
Why are individuals behaving this way?
It is:
What kinds of people are our environments helping to create?
And perhaps more importantly:
What human capacities are those environments gradually engineering out of us?
Are they weakening patience?
Curiosity?
Empathy?
Tolerance of ambiguity?
Our willingness to remain connected to people who are different from us?
Our capacity to recognise humanity in forms that do not resemble the preferred image?
Proactive maintenance of our humanity
Through the Six Stages Framework lens, proactive maintenance should not be limited to preserving the individual surface. About the Six Stages Framework
It should include noticing and addressing the conditions that move individuals, relationships and systems down the negative axis. Explore the positive and negative axes of the SSF
The warning signs may initially appear small:
- increasing contempt;
- casual dehumanising language;
- discomfort with difference;
- growing isolation;
- hostility becoming entertainment;
- and diminishing concern when particular people are harmed.
These are not merely individual moral failings.
They may indicate environments in which empathy is being unevenly activated, difference is being recoded as deficiency and dehumanisation is becoming easier to rehearse.
Preparedness therefore requires more than responding after exclusion, hostility or violence has become entrenched.
It requires periodic examination of what we have gradually learned to accept as normal.
Perhaps we need to practise proactive maintenance of:
- our capacity to recognise the humanity of others;
- our tolerance of difference and imperfection;
- our relationships and communities;
- our ability to remain curious rather than contemptuous;
- and the systems that influence whose lives, pain and vulnerability matter to us.
The danger of idealising perfection is not only that we may reject parts of ourselves.
It is that we may begin deciding—consciously or unconsciously—which other people stand too far from the ideal to receive our full empathy.
So I return to the question:
What are we proactively maintaining—and what are we allowing to deteriorate unnoticed?
Questions for reflection
What are our environments teaching us to perfect?
What—or whom—are they teaching us to experience as imperfect?
Whose vulnerability do we recognise immediately, and whose do we question or overlook?
Which warning signs have become so familiar that we no longer respond to them with urgency?
Explore more: SSF Weekly Reflections — Through the SSF Lens
