Why I don’t think it makes sense to try to be authentic
nb: This piece is almost entirely unoriginal. I wrote it because I wish I had read something like it years ago/I think the idea ought to spread more widely. It’s also going to be a little Buddhist-heavy. I’ve decided not to include any Pali/Sanskrit/Tibetan terms, because I suspect I don’t grasp the full meanings associated with any of them and don’t want to create confusion for someone who goes on to do “real Buddhism.”
In Buddhism, one of the key aspects of enlightenment is a quality of lightness and freedom that allows you to be deeply responsive to your context. We can gesture towards factors of responsiveness:
- You can’t be responsive to a situation if you’ve misunderstood it. To recognize what’s actually happening around you, you first have to be present. This means you need to be present to the situation itself, as well as your feelings about it or concepts related to it. Presence is a big part of what you’re trying to cultivate in most kinds of meditation (like noting or most breath work).
- Once you know what is happening, you have to understand the appropriate way to relate to your environment. The ability to determine how one should adapt to a particular context is often called “skillfulness,” and it has a number of factors: you need to be aligned, open to your full range of emotional experiences, and willing to let go of your preconceptions about how you (or people in general, or any in-group) typically react to situations like this one. Good practices for this are parts work and somatic practices.
- Having understood the correct mode of relationship or course of action, you then need to actually make it happen. Obviously this can be hard, and can require apparently inflexible qualities like courage or discipline. I don’t know of any good classical practices for this - my guess is something like working out is probably pretty decent? Alignment is also really helpful here, it’s pretty unusual that you’ll run into a situation where you know something is appropriate but don’t want to do it if you’re well-aligned.
An important tool for figuring out the best way to relate to your context is the realization of not-self. When you have realized not-self, you don’t automatically view situations from the reference point of your own ego (so an angry remark, for example, parses as a sign of someone hurting somehow instead of as a potential threat). You also don’t need to limit your potential responses to a situation by running them through a “is this something I would do” filter. So not-self helps you understand both what’s happening and how to respond.
I bring up not-self because I want to talk about authenticity. In the past, I’ve understood authenticity to mean something like “acting in a way that’s congruent with who you truly are.” I now think this is a bad thing to strive for and I hope this helps some reader to figure it out faster than I did. “Who you truly are” implies a self in all the ways that are likely to make you less responsive. If you’re being who you truly are, you misunderstand situations that activate your particular traumas, aversions, or desires. You also decide how to do things based on how your conceptualized version of yourself behaves in similarly encoded situations. This makes authenticity a tricky value to navigate.
Generally, I think the idea of being authentic can probably be replaced with more useful models, but if you’re attached to it, I think you can make it work if you interpret it differently than I did. I don’t see any problem, for example, with being authentic to your moral values, as long as you’re willing to hold the values themselves loosely enough that you can change them if they end up being wrong. I also think it often makes sense to be authentic to significant aspects of your emotional or phenomenological experience (with usual caveats about working within cultural and social contexts).
The last thing I’d add here is that I’m not trying to say that authenticity itself is bad. When I percieve someone as authentic, the signs of that “from the outside” seem to be something like honesty and congruence, which are both traits I value. The flipside of the “targeting authenticity will hurt your responsiveness” model is that you don’t have to target authenticity, because autheticity is a bundle of traits that make more sense to target individually. If you spend your time trying to become more aligned and developing factors that promote honesty, my intuition is that you will naturally become more authentic (as percieved by others) without nearly as much risk of losing responsiveness.