My son is a second year university student and also a keen gamer. This weekend he is going to Amsterdam to meet up with fellow members of his World of Warcraft guild. That suprised me as I would have thought that keen gamers who were in need of some rest and recreation would have taken themselves off to the Amsterdam equivalent of Second Life, or some such. Even dedicated gamers need some face-to-face interaction, so it seems.

This makes me think that the science fiction vision of the future where we all stay home and live out our lives through sleek, muscular, attractive online avatars is still a long way off. For now, I'm afraid, it still matters what we look like in the flesh. Unfortunately if you are overweight then that is going to cloud other people's perception of you. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in his excellent book Blink, this all happens down at the subconscious level. Irrespective of how clear of prejudices a person manages to be in their conscious thoughts, their initial impression of you and their initial reactions to you will still be affected by that first visual image. This is pretty significant when it comes to things like job interviews.

Clearly in an ideal world it wouldn't be like this, but there is no escaping it. Until the day arrives when we all mostly live our lives through the virtual world, then meeting people will be just that little bit easier if make yourself as presentable as you can.