Charges of Geresy

Recently, while perusing LinkedIn, I came across a post by a researcher celebrating their recent achievement. They claimed to have had a number of papers accepted into a conference. They had simply posted that fact, with no context about what the papers were on, or what their interest was in them. Without making any assumptions about the motivations for doing such a thing, this made me think about authenticity and why we do the things we do.

What does it mean to be authentic? Ironically, you might think reading an article about authenticity shouldn’t help you too much, because if you’re actively seeking to be authentic, then you’re already doing it wrong. But this post isn’t one which tries to teach you to be authentic – it’s more an exploration of what authenticity really means and the implications of living life in different ways. In short, authenticity is simply accepting yourself for what you are, and not trying to appear more or less so, or show yourself as more or less so. In the world of commerce, it would be allowing the spotlight to fall on the misshapen, but useful, prototype that you’ve crafted, as opposed to fine tuning a beautiful, minimalist advert to mask the imperfections. It is content over appearances. It is the inner vs the outer, and this is an apt description, since most often we need to think about it’s about caring less about what other people (the outer) perceive, instead of valuing what the we (the inner) believe.

It’s all well and good to sing the praises of authenticity, simply for the sake of it. But we have to ask the question – why is it a good thing to be authentic? It’s not often we question what might seem to be an obvious fact such as this one. But if we dig deep, then that helps us better understand the reasons why we do something (and – coincidentally – that is part of being authentic).

Too often we are too focused on other people’s perception of what we do to enjoy what we actually do. It feels good to get recognition and status. Humans need to be recognised, to be acknowledged; it is what drives social media and the incessant need for likes and followers, it’s what encourages us to raise our social status by earning more money. But why does this happen? As it turns out, I believe it stems from a conflict of internal interest.

This conflict is about where we derive meaning. In life, we can derive meaning – a sense of fulfilment of our goals – from many sources; and we as humans have internal desires to be recognised and liked by others, thus can derive meaning from this. Feeling that we are liked and noticed is no doubt a fulfilling feeling. But as with every good thing, there can be too much of it.

This desire to be liked and noticed can be expressed through the desire to acquire more and more money, or can materialise in the arbitrary metrics used to determine the popularity (and implicitly “goodness”) of a post on social media. We’re often told that worrying about superficial things such as these is a bad thing – the reason for this isn’t that there is inherently something wrong with feeling good about receiving recognition, but rather it is because when that is becomes our main focus then it means that we have replaced our self-perception with the perception of others. Consequently, our self-esteem, our sense of self-worth, and our confidence is completely tied to the fluctuations of what we think are others’ views of us. Our self-perception becomes a bit like an asset in a volatile stock market, floating on a rough and choppy sea of opinion. Some celebrities may fall into this trap because they inhabit a sphere where fame and cash are plentiful. They may appear to be happy, since on a daily basis they receive mini shots of self-worth from their external environment, but in reality they will face the constant threat of having their internal sense of self-worth stripped away when their ratings drop marginally, or they say something slightly unorthodox or out of line.

It’s great when what we do aligns with what others seem to want us to do. That means that there’s no conflict of interest in our goals and motivation. But problems begin to arise when we get so used to others’ interests aligning with our own that we begin to confuse the two. Eventually, we can forget our own opinions even existed, and we place total importance on the opinions of others. We begin to filter our self-image through the lens of other people, and what comes out is a blurry monochrome that lacks clarity.

The truth is that we have to balance both things. It’s impossible not to care about what others think of us. It’s human instinct, and I would argue it’s what has led to the evolution of societies which work together successfully. If humans didn’t care about each other, then they would not be able to make compromises which sacrificed their own interests for the interests of the “herd”, and we would have socially evolved much more slowly than we have done. Communication and social evolution have driven much of the success of humans in the last few thousand years, and our ability to cooperate on a massive scale in the form of societies and groups which can traverse cities and borders, as well as years and generations, has led us to become arguably the most successful species on the planet.

However, in our drive for efficiency, we have managed to distil this measurement of social status (our contribution to the interests of the herd) into very pure elements; the most salient of these are money and social media likes (or equivalent). Having such a quantitative and visual reminder of our perceived social status can be soul crushing and leads us to live our lives for others, forgetting ourselves in the process.

But authenticity is about doing things because we feel they are valuable or meaningful. We should take the opinions of others with a pinch of salt – taking them only so far as they need to be taken, that is, not doing things that benefit us at the expense of others. But, beyond this, the best thing to do is to do those things that we find meaningful – to do what we enjoy and feel is valuable to both us and society. Whether that is volunteering for a charity, artistry, raising children, writing, science, washing the dishes, or any other endeavour – what really matters most is whether we feel it is worth doing and whether we can feel whole doing it, independently of what others might think.

Authenticity is not yet another thing that we should, or even can use to measure people’s worth or observe about them – that would be completely against the point. If you look up the word “authentic” in a dictionary, then you might find the word “real” as a synonym. It means that something doesn’t just appear to be something else, but is indeed that thing throughout. Authenticity means both believing and being something, for our own sakes first and for others’ second.