Which is easier: Get thin or get rich?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was watching a (bad) comedy special recently and one of comics was beating the dead horse of how much harder it is for women because they have to conform to an unrealistic standard of beauty where guys just need money and they can find a woman.

Is this a real thought people have, or is it just hackneyed joke material for bad comics? If it’s a real thought, is the idea that it’s easy to get rich? And the obvious follow-up: Why aren’t you rich?

The more I think about it, the more I think they’re equivalent. To a large extant, you’re either born with good genes or a predisposition (lifestyle, motivation) to be in good shape. Similarly, you’re either born into money or with a predisposition (ambition, skillset) to acquire wealth. Otherwise it’s overwhelmingly likely that you’ll be fat or poor or both.

If we extend it to beauty in general (as opposed to just the weight aspect of beauty) I’m not sure it’s any easier to get rich than it is to get beautiful.

2

I think rich is much harder than thin, but much easier than beauty.

3

Well you could get thin by having someone lock you in a room with only water and limited food. It would be much harder to achieve wealth with so little effort.

4

I think the “genetic disposition to being fat”, while a real thing for some people, is wildly overestimated in it’s prevalence in the general population.

Even if you have said disposition, getting thin is a combination of regular exercise and a healthy diet, which anybody can do. Getting attractive is much more difficult, because then you also have to pay attention to things like hairstyle, skin care, clothing choices, etc, although being in great shape will go a long way to make this easier.

Getting super-rich, on the other hand, involves a great deal of luck or already being rich, so it’s the most difficult of the three.

IMHO.

5

Well, I’d say somewhere between point one and ten percent of the country is rich, depending on how you want to define “rich.” Somewhere around 40-45% of the country has a BMI that puts them in the “healthy weight” category, if that’s what you want to call “thin.”

I really think this is a no-brainer unless you neck down the terms some more.

6

Starvation is guaranteed to make you thin. Unfortunately there’s no guaranteed way to get rich.

7

To answer the simple question of the OP first, I think getting thin is definitely easier than getting rich, probably by at least an order of magnitude. Yes, there are certainly factors beyond one’s control that can make it more difficult to be thin for one person than another, but even given that, being thin is still just a formulation of diet and exercise. In theory, anyone can be thin.

When looking at being rich, other than just getting lucky by winning the lottery or the like, some people just don’t have the skills for it. If you’re not particularly bright and don’t have a specifically useful skill set, you may still be able to live fairly comfortably, but you won’t end up rich. And even with people who are really smart and have useful skills, it often still takes a certain amount of luck on top of hard work. I know plenty of people who are brilliant and hard working, and while they’re well off, they would only fit the loosest definition of rich.

Now, if we’re talking about beauty vs. wealth, rather than thin vs. wealth, I think it’s a more interesting argument. Beauty is one of those things that definitely requires luck. There are plenty of people who can eat well, exercise a lot, and they can maximize their genetic potential for a particular beauty standard, but they’re still limited by their genetics. If you’re born with unattractive features, bad symmetry, etc. you might work as hard as you can and achieve a maximum that someone else who hit the genetic lottery can easily surpass with minimal effort.

Even with all of that, I still think being rich is more difficult. In my experience, most people, if they get into decent shape, groom and dress themselves well, can be attractive to most people, whereas most people will never approach anything a reasonable person would call rich.

With that all said, this is an aside, but I also disagree with the assertion of the comedy special, though it is a trope, that women have unrealistic beauty standards and men do not. I do agree with the idea that our culture puts greater pressure on women to look a certain way, but particularly in the last decade or so, the beauty standards for men have increased. Men do have to dress a certain way, and are under increasing social pressure to maintain certain grooming standards that weren’t there before. Again, I don’t think this pressure is as great for women as it is for men, but at the same time, I think we’re more aware, socially and culturally, of the pressures on women, and less so on men. After all, we’re all aware of the issues of female models starving themselves and being airbrushed into unachieveable body shapes, but there’s also plenty of male models who have bodies that also set standards requiring countless hours in the gym, precise dieting, and starvation and airbrushing for photo shoots as well. Even the most elite male athletes don’t go around looking like they do on sports, fitness, and men’s magazines.

And I don’t mean any of that as some kind of men vs. women thing, rather as a general observation that social pressure of physical appearance in our culture as a whole is something I find concerning, particularly when I see people doing unhealthy diets to get thin or put themselves in debt to have the latest fashion.

8

It’s difficult for me to accept that. Just in the context of this thread, being over-weight is something men can simply cover up with a nice suit, women are left to wear tents and disregarded by both men and women for not meeting a body shape ideal. In addition skilled men can look like slobs and be valued for their abilities while women with the same skills will still be judged in part on their appearance. To say that men are under greater pressure maintain standards of appearance just doesn’t make sense in the world I see.

9

A related question: Which is easier, to stay thin or to stay rich? I think it’s easier to get thin than get rich, but easier to stay rich than stay thin.

Although having money would help with staying thin.

10

I’ve never worn a tent or been disregarded for not meeting a body shape ideal, and I’ve been all weight ranges between underweight and obese. I have been given the “pretty face” gene (as in, “…but she has such a pretty face!”) and am tall, so my experience may not be the norm.

This is true.

11

I don’t know how to describe it quite right, but I do think women in business can get short changed when it comes to weight. We’re not talking about a social scene, and not everyone is a jerk, but I’ve seen younger, skinnier, and less than the brightest bulb in the chandelier get a boost based on their appearance. And certainly the same can happen with men, but IMHO less often.

12

I think it’s easier to become thin. Becoming thin can be done by anyone who follows a certain regiment. There’s a stepwise progression to become thin.

Getting rich, on the other hand, requires creating solutions to the specific problems at hand. There’s not a series of steps to get rich. You need to understand your strengths and weaknesses and figure out how you and your specific personality can become rich. An introverted engineer would likely fail at being in sales, but could get rich at a startup, provided the startup happens to not fold after a year. Becoming rich involves you putting yourself in the right places and those places happening to do well. Even if you are in the right place, there’s an element of luck to being successful.

13

If it were as easy to be rich as it is to be thin, I’d be rich.

Yeah, if I inherited a bunch of money, I think I’d be okay at not fucking it up.

14

I think for most people, it’s easiest to be thin (or to conform to society’s unrealistic standards of beauty, at least for women) when you’re in your teens and twenties, and it gets increasingly harder the older you get. On the other hand, youth is not the period when the average guy’s earning power is the highest: it can take many years to build up wealth.

So it seems that, if you’re talking about who has it easier when it comes to attracting a mate, females have the advantage early on, but time is on the males’ side.

15

Your thread title doesn’t match up with the point of the comedians joke, if he was really joking about beauty. Like several people said, you can get locked in a room and starved until you lose weight, but weight loss has only a bit to do with beauty.

It won’t help most women conform to the unrealistic standard of beauty, because most of those women will still be average looking to gross after the weight loss. There’s very few stunningly gorgeous women nobody notices because they’re 50 pounds overweight.

On the other hand, men don’t need to be very rich to be successful with women. If you want to date a decent woman who is just looking for a partner who can help provide for the family, you don’t need a particularly high income. If you just want to date some skank who will only fuck you for your money, you still don’t need a particularly high income to find one whose standards are low enough. So it might be extremely hard to become rich, but it’s very attainable to get an income a standard deviation or two higher than the median and that’s all that is needed.

16

It’s the OP that doesn’t fully match. The comic was mostly focused on weight in particular when she made that observation. I just didn’t write the OP very well.

It went through several drafts, as I was concerned with coming across as misogynistic. This wasn’t trying to be a dig at women, more like an honest “wait, it’s easy to get money?” reaction to the line.

To clarify: She never said “rich”, she said “money.” And I’m not sure if she specifically said “thin”, either. The routine was mainly about squeezing into skinny jeans.

17

So the trick to getting thin is becoming a camp follower, but it’s gotta be the right camp?

An interesting theory! :wink:

18

I got pretty well into adulthood before I realized there were men who literally believed you needed money to get women. I always took it as a humorous exaggeration since having money is clearly actually one way to get at least some women.

I never took it seriously because it’s so demonstrably false… there’s non-rich men everywhere with wives who’re often thin or gorgeous. My experience has been that the vast majority of women care about their potential partner’s career but are just looking for someone stable. There’s a subset of women who’re very skanky and totally go for a man’s money, but the vast majority are so poor that even someone with a merely decent professional job could seem loaded.

In other words, I say it’s easier for men to have enough money just because the amount of money most women expect a man to earn is much lower and more attainable than people seem to think. I don’t think the same can be said about women and the expectations of their bodies. Men have pretty damn high expectations of what type of woman’s body they deserve to be with, often completely incongruous with their own body.

19

Nah, just walk into a bank with a gun. Easy-peasy.

20

Just wanted to pick up on this because this is a common sentiment; and seems to imply being overweight is just a matter of gluttony and lack of self control.

The proportion of people who have once been obese who manage to get to a healthy bodyweight and stay there, is actually very low. And more and more of the data is suggesting that factors like hormones such as leptin and gut microbiota can make a big difference to appetite levels and predisposition to storing fat.

It’s not that some people have the excuse of “genetic disposition to being fat”, but more like the factors add up to a normal distribution and people on the wrong end of it may find it extremely difficult to keep within a healthy bodyweight and would find themselves very hungry virtually all the time.

This fits with my personal experience because I am slim but I basically eat whatever I like. But I only feel like eating burgers or pizza once or twice a week, and can’t eat that much when I do.
Although I do a lot of exercise too, I still think that if staying slim was this easy for everyone, very few people would be fat.