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Beautiful essay. I don’t quite agree, nor do I quite disagree, but it makes me think.
My own perspective on body modification is that the body is worth handling with deep seriousness and forethought. Our culture lacks much of the framework to make modification like tattoos meaningful, but more dramatic changes are inherently more meaningful (for better or worse) — people should approach them with seriousness and we should build proper frameworks around them if they intend to pursue them. Such frameworks are buildable but effortful, and are mostly not individual efforts. They can’t be divorced from societal context. A meaningless tattoo is no more or less a tragedy than the rest of a meaningless life.
Is the context you outline sufficient justification? That’s not really up to me, and it certainly isn’t my style, but it seems like people are having a good time. You make a compelling defense.
That's pretty much the steelman I'm trying to draw here. In my mind I have this mega-high standard for getting tattoos, like you should have an achievement or experience of magnitude >X to "earn" a tattoo that is meaningful. But then, the people getting tattoos seem to be having fun. I'm reading the Naz Reid article, and it seems fun, and that seems like the absolute last bottom tier idiot tattoo, it's not even a good sports fandom! The Wolves suck!
That's what I was getting at in my reply to @VinoVeritas earlier, intellectually there's a lot of connecting Tattoos and Low Fertility or Lack of Social Meaning or Downward Social Mobility. But do those things actually connect? Or is it a case of projection, that when I'm lobbing those critiques I'm talking about my own lack of meaning?
I set all these absurd conditions, like other users have mentioned, on what would justify getting a tattoo. "10 years in the Navy Seals" or "Winning the World Series" or "Proving an Unsolved Mathematical Theorem" or "Being in Lord of The Rings" or whatever. When I say a tattoo should be meaningful, and that it's "wrong" to get one without meaning, am I projecting my own lack of meaning, my own sense of unworthiness to have meaning, my sense of having failed to earn meaning?
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