At least people in the past were more honest. No virtue signalling. No therapeutic/psychological lies. No fake positivety or lies about self-improovement 
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From 'A companion to Byzantium'.
Baldness, a physical flaw which comes into contrast with the Byzantine fascination with beautiful locks, also serves as the butt of Byzantine jokes. Choniates describes the populace howling with laughter at the sight of John Doukas's bald head gleaming in the sun "brighter than the full moon" while he notes mockingly that Andronikos I Komnenos's head appeared "balder than an egg" in his disgrace in the Hippodrome. Byzantium is the world in which uglyness is a source of amusement for others, where the obese, the bald, the dark-skinned are ridiculed, where jesters are ugly men...
Ugliness linked to ridicule in Byzantine writing, also served as a source of abuse...Tzetzes abusive comments associate physical ugliness with other, non-physical, shortcomings in the character's moral fibre, intellectual capacity, social standing or conduct, aligning ugliness with the vile, the low-born, the immoral and the unintelligent...
...Ugliness was perceived as a form of social stigma in Byzantium. In the romance of Rodanthi and Dosiklis, the hero Dosiklis claims that he is worthy of beautiful Rodanthi attention "as my face is not incomparable [to hers]. Nor am I strange and unsociable. For as a man, I too, am beautiful in appearance".Dosiklis reference to the "strange and unsociable" nature of ugliness can only make sense in a world in which ugliness was linked to social stigmatization.
.From 'A companion to Byzantium'.
Baldness, a physical flaw which comes into contrast with the Byzantine fascination with beautiful locks, also serves as the butt of Byzantine jokes. Choniates describes the populace howling with laughter at the sight of John Doukas's bald head gleaming in the sun "brighter than the full moon" while he notes mockingly that Andronikos I Komnenos's head appeared "balder than an egg" in his disgrace in the Hippodrome. Byzantium is the world in which uglyness is a source of amusement for others, where the obese, the bald, the dark-skinned are ridiculed, where jesters are ugly men...
Ugliness linked to ridicule in Byzantine writing, also served as a source of abuse...Tzetzes abusive comments associate physical ugliness with other, non-physical, shortcomings in the character's moral fibre, intellectual capacity, social standing or conduct, aligning ugliness with the vile, the low-born, the immoral and the unintelligent...
...Ugliness was perceived as a form of social stigma in Byzantium. In the romance of Rodanthi and Dosiklis, the hero Dosiklis claims that he is worthy of beautiful Rodanthi attention "as my face is not incomparable [to hers]. Nor am I strange and unsociable. For as a man, I too, am beautiful in appearance".Dosiklis reference to the "strange and unsociable" nature of ugliness can only make sense in a world in which ugliness was linked to social stigmatization.
