I've felt this way for years, but once you leave school and start working in the "real-world", it becomes more apparent just how much of a struggle everything is just to keep a homoeostasis, so to speak. It's hard to really focus or enjoy things when you're constantly worrying about shit like receding hairlines, paranoia about Fin side-effects, having to save for Hair-transplants in the future and whole host of shit like that. Yeah, it's superficial as fuck, but as I said, this is the game we all seem to be playing (as far as I can see), and whether we like it or not, everyone is secretly weighing each other up, judging each other based on appearance and status etc. It's fucked up that we haven't evolved beyond it, but that's the way it is. It makes me sick that I'm even worried about this shit, but it's built into my very biology/psychology and so there is very little I can do about it, unless I become a Buddhist monk or something.
I've done some of the things I enjoy, such as travelling etc, and perhaps it's just because I'm still young, but I feel like I wouldn't even enjoy any of those things if I was balding.
As regards to "spending time with people who mean something to me", the funny thing is, the few friends I've had, have been far more egotistical than me. (In fact, this post is the first time I've even talked about these topics, I keep it to myself and let it fester as a mental illness lol.) My friends go to sun-beds and never leave the gym, they're obsessed with grooming.
I just feel like there is nothing "authentic" in this world. As I've said, it's all just a vanity fair. Even the things we think we do for "authentic" reasons, at their core, I feel they stem from crude egotism. That's really all there is here. Even when I listen to my father and older people, all they talk about is how much money so and so makes and how well educated such and such is.
This world is filth, rotten to core. If I had a button on my arm where I could switch myself off, I would...the whole affair makes me sick to my stomach.