Part of it is wanting to get a full-time job, as I live so poorly being just an author and musician. I know I'll feel dishonest about myself trying to look nice doing whatever I might do in the future,
Self-improvement (aka dressing better) isn't dishonest - that'd be like saying that an obese person deciding to lose weight is "being dishonest" by changing something about them, and that they should just remain fat.
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especially since I constantly talk about how the work should speak for itself, not the other miscellaneous crap.
Well the truth is that the "work" is more than just the summary of a list of completed task - it's the overall experience you provide - this includes the sensory experience you provide as well. Showing up somewhere dressed sloppily is a visual eyesore, just like farting in a crowd is.
If a guy for example chooses to show up to a job interview wearing a beer-stained Homer Simpson T-shirt and cut-off denim shorts, he's probably not getting the job even if he's technically the most qualified on the resume - and that really is the way things "should be", because people are emotional creatures - we're not robots with no emotional needs or experiences as well.
So the guy's options are to self-justify just because he doesn't want to change, and associates it as "who he is" (only because he's been doing it for so long), or he can choose to improve. There's no such thing as "who you are" anyway - who you are is really just the summary of your actions - if you choose to start dressing better to make you more presentable for promotions, then your choice to do so becomes "who you are".
Maybe a girl can help me, but it seems like even single women wear rings. Is this true? Not that I would do anything about it even if she were single.
Well you decided up-front that "you wouldn't do anything about it".
Me I wouldn't care if she was wearing a ring or not, I'd always approach a woman I was interested in - worst that could happen is that she'd say no - I wouldn't beat around the bush coming up with a laundry list of trivialities in order to justify avoiding a situation with very low risk, but very high reward.
At the same time I'd definitely not mentally program myself into inaction by posting on the internet "I'm not going to do it" - imagine if before a game a sports team got together and chanted "We're gonna lose! We're gonna lose"! Hah