The Authenticity Crisis

How to reset without the self-indignation. Thomas Merton on The Spiritual Life. William Irvine on The Good Life. Stephen Dunn on A Good Life.

All our Sundays are paywalled — but if you can’t afford to pay for a subscription at this time, email me: ajd@thesmallbow.com and I’ll hook you up.

Let’s go. — AJD

*****

One of the appealing upsides after a terrible life-changing event is that the healing process oftentimes allows a person’s "authentic" self to shine brightly through. Some people arrive there through trauma therapy, sobriety, or an ayahuasca session in Belize.

But after the metamorphosis takes hold, your days of coasting through life and wasting away as a secondary character are over. We must all now do the hard thing from here on out, embrace comfort in the uncomfortable, and buy many self-help books that use what I like to call fuck-asterisks in their titles. But if authenticity becomes an identity, is it even authentic anymore?

In the past decade, I have found the healing and have searched for the pathway into my authentic self in all the usual ways, most of which you've read about here. And at several moments I had stumbled upon it, but now I fear I've lost it again.

I am worried that writing this newsletter and doing the podcast has corrupted my sense of authenticity. Sometimes I only think about you, the reader or listener, rather than thinking about myself and my well-being. Some days, the only way for me to feel like my authentic self is when I get YOU to like me? (I will admit when I'm really needy about this, I'll write about my kids or death, and that usually elicits the response I'm hoping for.)

I intended to find some sturdy intellectual scaffolding to help me polemicize about America's Authenticity Crisis properly but that got real dark and boring. The only place I found some real nitty-gritty wisdom to support how I feel came from a shipost on Reddit.

There is no authentic self. We cosplay this and that until we wind up with something that seems to do the job (meaning passing along requests and demands successfully, effectively, between whatever's in there and whatever's out there).

The feeling of authenticity is good because it helps convey sincerity, which, of course, is suitable for convincing others that we are, in fact, authentic, even though there is no such thing. Believing that it's real, even though it's not, is very important to building community, namely, accumulating people you can depend on and that can rely on you.

I mean—that's spot-on, right? I feel like this is what many of us do and I wonder if that means we're all irredeemably f*cked.