Don't be authentic.
Authenticity is just another word for ego tripping. It’s just more branding in a world of inescapable advertisement. Don’t do that to yourself.
I am worried that you’re being authentic.
Don’t be authentic.
And don’t trust authenticity in any form.
Authenticity is a tool of oppression.
Authenticity is the go-to con of marketers and cult leaders.
Authenticity is not a thing.
People are not authentic.
Inauthenticity is human nature. We learn how to deceive ourselves and others at an early age and we never forget. It’s how we survive.
You may have been told differently.
You may have been told that if you just find your true self you will be happy.
That if you present yourself in an authentic way, people will like you more.
Cheryl Strayed wrote, “Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic.”
Sounds like good advice, right? If you can just show your true self, you will be loved. Who doesn’t want to believe that?
But what human do you know who isn’t authentically a strategic and coy jackass?
“Strategic and coy jackass” may be the very definition of a modern human—if we were to take an authentic look at ourselves. Strategizing our lives and relationships is the key to survival, and jackassery—well, have you looked around?
It’s an understandable sentiment, the idea that authenticity has more value than being a jackass. After all, people pay more for authentic. Jackassery ends up in the dollar bin at Walmart.
We know this. We’re fine-tuned consumers.
That’s how authenticity became such a lucrative con: “the real thing” is more valuable.
Realness has become a commodity on par with water—tainted, bottled, and increasingly scarce. (They even sell rain water in cans now—authentic, from the actual sky.) So you have to strategize. You have to adapt. You have to give up on authenticity.
We no longer live in an age of authenticity. That’s why people are so desperate to find authenticity in the world and in themselves. We want things to be like they were back in the good old days—like we see in old movies on TV! But forget it. It’s over. We’re so far gone from the age of authenticity that you can now reasonably assume anything that calls itself authentic is selling you something.
Let’s look at some ways the pretense of authenticity is destroying the world.
Obvious one: “He tells it like it is”…
If you believe someone “tells it like it is,” that person has pulled a dangerous con on you.
Once people believe someone is authentic, they believe everything that person says. And then everything that person opposes becomes a lie.
Don’t believe the scientists, believe the guy who ‘tells it like it is’ when he says a deadly virus is just a flu that will vanish like magic in a month.
Don’t believe objective facts, believe the guy who seems authentic in his insistence that the election was stolen from him. (What could possibly be his motivation, after all, other than to speak the truth, being that he’s so authentic? Certainly no selfish motives, just pure adherence to the truth.)
You go down that road far enough, you end up a pawn in some rich man’s game, dressing like a viking and attacking your own country’s buildings—then in some dark prison demanding organic vegetables. (The quest for purity, after all, extends to water and vegetables these days.) Or maybe you inject yourself with bleach, if you prefer your purity in the form of the “classic” chemicals. But you’re certainly not going to inject yourself with a vaccine—you never know what’s in those things. You’d rather trust your authentic immunity.
Don’t fall for all of that.
No one is authentic. Everyone is a liar. To themselves, to others. You don’t want it to be true, but it is. The desperate desire for that authentic enlightened unicorn-person is what has kept politicians and cult leaders in business for thousands of years.
There are no enlightened people. Stop looking for them. Run fast and far away from anyone who claims to be authentic. They are definitely selling you something.
Another one: Authentic religious texts…
If your religious text is deemed authentic, you get to control people’s bodies and minds. If your religious text is deemed inauthentic, you have no power over anyone. And the people deeming your religious text as inauthentic will probably bomb you in the name of people who deem their own religious text as authentic.
Con artists and fundamentalist religious people (the ones who preach that every word in their texts is authentic but pick and choose which words to enforce) love the benefits of authenticity but can’t stand the truth. The truth would put them out of power.
Don’t teach science in schools, teach the authentic truth of creationism. (Otherwise…certain people will no longer have tax exemptions, a morally superior standing in society, and the ability to control the uteruses of women.)
But it’s not always that extreme. Everyday people wield the pretense of their own authentic selves over others.
So many carefully crafted “authentic” personas on social media reveal curated details about themselves to seem authentic. The poet who writes intricate tomes about the depths of his authentically deep and socially responsible empathetic self, then scrolls through old tweets from some stranger’s feed looking for the slightest hint of socially unacceptable thoughts to “out” in order to prove his worth as the woke king of poetry and life itself.
“This is my authentic self, super deep and caring about all diverse lives, and this is this other person’s authentic self, they once said something vaguely racist in 2015, OMG can you believe it? Ban them, and follow me for more tips on who else is authentically a terrible person.”
Look, there’s a reason Instagram has a million filters and zero un-filters. People don’t want authenticity, they just want to believe their fake selves are authentic. Tell the lie often enough and it becomes true. Keep posting, keep building that brand.
Anyway, I’m not here to judge any of that. It’s learned behavior from what I’d assume to be the early days of human history. I’m not here to change it.
I just don’t want you to do it.
Not because it’s shady—but because it’s self-limiting and lame.
Pop psychology says you should dig through your insides and find your authentic self and get rid of what is not your authentic self.
What does that mean? Probably that you should repress stuff that gives you anxiety because it’s not currently socially acceptable and/or doesn’t help you pick up chicks and/or is otherwise influenced by millions of outside factors likely based in the whims of capitalism and institutional racism and patriarchy and all those other things half the people love and half the people hate these days.
You don’t want to live that way.
You don’t want to be a slave to your own carefully crafted “authentic” self.
Authenticity is just another word for ego tripping. It’s just more branding in a world of inescapable advertisement. Don’t do that to yourself.
If you don’t believe me, don’t worry. Soon there will be AI that can read your thoughts before you even think them. They will certainly have a different view of your authentic self than the one you present to the world.
For now, this authenticity that seeks to control people is profitable, yes, for populist politicians and social media accounts seeking followers and for corporations (“Coke: It’s the Real Thing”), but it is shallow and self-limiting.
Find a different path.
Constantly look at ways to invent yourself. Then reinvent yourself. Then reinvent yourself again. Don’t get stuck on one “true” persona, one way of seeing. You don’t have to be a servant to the person you were yesterday. You don’t have to convince yourself that the persona that gives you the least anxiety is your “true self” just because it is offers the path of least resistance to what capitalism tells you is cool or slick.
Embrace your inner jackass. Make mistakes. Learn from them. Then make more mistakes.
Be as strategic and coy as you want to be. You will get to a way cooler place than the prison of your phony authentic self. You’re going to be strategic anyway—you’re human, you can’t help it—so go all in and strategize the shit out of your life.
Don’t fall for the narrow, narcissistic path of authenticity.
Don’t turn yourself into a product on a shelf trying to fetch more profit by proving its authenticity.
You’re not a chicken in the frozen food aisle. Don’t worry about being organic. Focus on being cage free.
How do you become free?
First, don’t seek authenticity in other people. That will save you so much trouble. No one knows the truth, no one “lives their truth,” everyone is a mess on a million levels, just trying to get by. The jazz musicians and the punk rockers and the indie folk bands are no more authentic than anyone else, regardless of what their PR reps tell you. Stop chasing their brand of authenticity.
Seriously, no one knows the first thing about god or what the true values of universal “goodness” may be, if they exist at all. We could just as easily be trapped in the some horrible sadistic experiment as we could be destined for eternal bliss. There’s such a strong desire for that not to be true—I get that—but you have to let go of the urge to find something external that holds “truth” just because it’s telling you something that you want to hear. The quest for some deep authenticity that manages to sound true and provide comfort is one of the most exploitable aspects of humans and one that has been relentlessly worked over by con artists and priests throughout history. Stop looking for it in other people—and especially in institutions. If you don’t, you are just another enabler of authoritarian rule, no matter how special you think you may be.
Most importantly, don’t drink your own Kool-Aid. You aren’t who you think you are. Recognize that your so-called authentic self is just your ego playing a trick on you. (For good reason—it wants you to reap the sweet sweet benefits of perceived authenticity, not the banishment of perceived jackassery.) The moment you believe your authentic self is superior to other people, stop, because all you’re doing is believing your own lame personal branding. The moment you judge someone for being a jackass, look at your own idiotic self and choose compassion instead. (If you’re like me, you have a deep well of humiliating incidents from which to draw for this exercise.) We’re all strategic and coy jackasses. No one is authentic. Don’t fall for your own bullshit.
And get outside of your comfort zone. Don’t hold yourself back. Live a life of experimentation, open-mindedness, constant questioning and evolution. Don’t get stuck on yourself. Don’t be afraid to look bad. Run far, far away from anyone who claims to know the truth about how you should live or what life is.
After all, we don’t have much time left, as a species, to be our inauthentic selves. We already live under constant targeted influence based on surveillance of everything we buy and most of the things we do. Soon, that surveillance will overtake our own once-free will. Until that happens—assuming it hasn’t already—find a new level of boldness.
Tell the self-appointed truth-tellers to go fuck themselves. Tell the self-important taste-makers you’d like to try a different flavor.
Authenticity is oppression.
Authenticity is a con.
Stop being authentic.
Thank you.