I'm an adult man, and I've never cared much about how I appear to others. This allows me to dress for comfort and practicality, and saves me a lot of money. However, I'm basically ignoring the common wisdom that appearances matter more than you'd think. So I'm naturally wondering if I'm making a mistake. I suspect several LessWrongers find themselves in similar situations.

Roughly, the model I'm following is as follows: My situation (work, social circle, self-image) is such that nobody cares much about how I look. There is little to gain beyond a low bar, where the low bar consists of things like getting a haircut every 3 months, don't smell bad and don't have holes in your clothes that show skin.

My main evidence in support of this picture comes from my own uncontrolled daily experiment: There is a high natural variance in how good I look. Sometimes I recently had a haircut and I'm wearing nice clothes, and sometimes I'm due a haircut and wearing particularly worn clothes. So if looks mattered significantly, I should observe positive outcomes significantly correlated with appearance. However, I essentially don't. I conclude that the effect of appearances in my daily life can't be that strong.

However, I've recently started looking into the possibility of acquiring a romantic partner. And for this purpose, looks matter a lot. A life partner can be a large factor in my overall life happiness and satisfaction. So now I'm wondering if the general advice that everyone should care about appearances, is primarily motivated by this single use-case?

My Appearance

Here are some examples of my choosing practicality and saving money over looking good:

• I usually wear 5-10 year old t-shirts that I got for free at some event.
• When needed I wear a sun hat that covers my face, ears and neck all at the same time, much more effectively than a cap. A friend once commented on it saying "my wife would never let me wear a sun hat". Alternatively, I sometimes use an umbrella to shield from the sun.
• My things (water bottle, wallet, clothing, etc.) generally look quite worn out, as I keep them until they lose their function, not just until they are worn.
• I sit / stand / lean whatever way I find most comfortable, which is usually not optimal visually.

I am however relatively tall and fit, which might offset some of my choices above. Furthermore, I do adhere to some low bar, such as cutting my hair every ~3 months and throwing away clothes with visible holes.

Standard Reasons to Care

There are some commonly quoted reasons for why one should care about looks:

• Self-esteem / self-confidence: Apparently people link their self-esteem to their appearance.
  This seems strange to me. I have pretty high self-esteem, and it doesn't seem significantly correlated with how I appear. If I smelled terribly, I would feel self-conscious about bothering others. However, this is a very low bar to pass, I don't see much gains beyond that.
• Better treatment in social situations: Apparently people treat you better if you're attractive.
  This seems plausible, especially when meeting random people. Even so, this effect seems negligible among the people I regularly interact with. If it were a significant effect in my daily life, I would expect to detect differences in treatment correlating with natural variance in my appearance. However, I find no discernible change whether I wear a decade-old, faded t-shirt with three months since a barber visit, or fresh clothes and haircut. This leads me to conclude that the social benefit, for me, must be quite small.
• Professional / work: Apparently appearances are useful for your career.
  This is clearly true for many lines of work, like public figures, but I expect the effect size to be small in my case. I don't have solid evidence either way; maybe my career would indeed be much more advanced if I was more handsome. However, I seem to have no problems finding work, and detect no bad first impressions in job interviews. Additionally, since my work can in principle be done remotely, over text really, I don't think appearances matter much.

In summary, I seem to be doing fine with my current unoptimized looks, and I see little evidence that better looks would yield better outcomes for me.

There is only one clear exception: looking good for the benefit of a romantic partner.

The Only Reason I Understand

Dating is highly attraction-based. We evolved to select good partners, and physical attraction is one of the primary heuristics. Even after dating, a romantic partner might gain significant overall life satisfaction from me optimizing my appearance, even if I don't care myself.

I get the impression that I'm not "supposed" to care about appearances only for the sake of a romantic partner. My mother didn't sell it like that. The vibe I get is that you should do it "to become a better person" or "do it for yourself". If I'm going to change my habits and spend much more money on clothing and accessories, I would expect better responses from declaring that I'm doing these things to "better myself" than saying I'm doing them to "attract and satisfy a romantic partner".

My hypothesis is that people who internalize the belief that they care about appearances "to become a better person" on average perform better than people who explicitly optimize to attract romantic partners. Focusing directly on the goal of satisfying a romantic partner could have many pitfalls. For example, you might conclude that your romantic partner is already locked in, so you can stop trying (which would then hurt the partner). Or you might over-optimize to appear attractive to one particular partner (who seems like the one at the time), but then break up with them and be left stranded. The general advice of caring about appearances seems generally more robust than the direct policy of optimizing for partner attraction and satisfaction.

Question

I'm interested in ways to detect the significance of my appearance outside of dating. Maybe a social experiment I could run in my daily life. It's not hard to seek out situations which highlight the importance of looks: I could partake in political debates or do stage performances. However, I'm looking for reasons to look good in my daily life, not just in contrived circumstances.

I'm aware that my circumstance is unusual in the general population. If I was a famous personality or did in person marketing, appearances would clearly matter. However, I assume that here on LessWrong there are others in similar situations to mine, where the standard justifications seem weak, for reasons described above. What do you think? Does my appearance primarily matter for romantic partners? Or am I missing something?