What does living authentically mean?

[Hiphopfrogger]

I see this a lot - I have to be true to myself/live authentically/see myself looking back at me in the mirror etc.

But what on earth does it mean, and why is it so important? Most of the time I’m too busy to even think about who I am (and barely look in a mirror!). Surely it’s better to consider what we DO, how we affect the people around us and what we can bring to the world, than just who we ARE.

I’m trying to not say anything that would get this thread deleted, but it seems this obsession with gender is so terribly inward looking, and something most women just don’t actually have any time for. Or do I have it all wrong?

Being true to myself is making sure the kids have their shoes on, that I have called my aging parents, that I have remembered to renew the RAC, that the things everyone likes are in the fridge, that the beds have been changed.

Then if I get a sit down, a cuppa, a good book that's also living my authentic life.

Exactly - considering other people. That’s ‘feminine’, traditionally, I suppose. Not naval gazing about whether we’re womanly or not.

It means precisely what the speaker wants it to.

So, like schlurminlenghen, it is of vital importance and should never be underestimated or ignored.

Mine would be living as the Queen of Sheba dressed up for a night on the town...

To be, being your authentic self is being aware of your flaws and being at peace with them and not posting selfies on SM with loads of filters and always having to hide behind the Facebook Facade.

I think it's one of those phrases that sounds profound but is essentially meaningless as the interpretation can be so broad.

I take it to mean something like, don't be ashamed of your interests, tastes, characteristics because you feel people won't accept them in someone like you (someone of your social class, race, sex etc). Unless it's something that is based on incorrect information.

As pp said, it's fairly meaningless, and sometimes used as an excuse for crap behaviour ("that's just who I am! ")

This article was quite interesting.

secularhumanism.org/2019/04/the-cult-of-authenticity/

''In any case, who is to say the self we know from the inside is more authentic than the one everyone else perceives? It might be if we all occupied our own little universes, with no contact with other humans, but since we don’t … how do we know that our interactions with the world and the people in it are not in fact part of our “self,” even the authentic one? The reality surely is that selves—characters, personalities, autobiographies—are built up from their experiences, including relations with other selves. We help to create each other, and that doesn’t make us less than “authentic.” ''

To take the notion seriously, it means living without feeling like you are pretending.

To me it means living in harmony with my Self - that how I act (my outer self) lines up with my needs and wants (my inner self). My feelings are what tells me whether I’m lined up or not. If I’m feeling annoyed or resentful about something, that’s telling me I’m not acting in line with my needs and wants, or I’m accepting behaviour from others that isn’t honouring what I need and want in life. So I can adjust my actions to do more of the things I need or say no to what I don’t want.

if you’re spending all your time with other people and revolving yourself around other people’s needs and wants, it can be very difficult to stay in tune with what you need and want.

unless perhaps you had a good chunk of time in childhood/young adult life where you had the space to really get to know yourself and what you like/don’t like and learned how to stay true to that. In which case it might come quite intuitively to you, so much so that you don’t understand how anyone could not act in line with themselves. (Hence why some people can’t fathom why domestic abuse victims stay with their partners).

It’s so important because staying true to your inner self will result in a contented life (not always happy, but peaceful). And not staying true to yourself results in being unhappy and resentful.

Authenticity is a subject that fascinates me. I love music, and in music authenticity is something that is often seen to be very important, especially in "serious" music like punk or rock.

But what does it mean? Are you being authentic to a tradition (ie authentic blues uses old fashioned techniques and equipment)? Or authentic to your own beliefs and life experiences? Does recording live in one take make something more authentic than something carefully produced? Is any art "authentic" or is it by definition artificial? Is music seen as more authentic the more it looks like it has come naturally in real time (eg a singer songwriter with a guitar) compared to lots of overdubbed synths on a bombastic 80s pop track.

I'm not sure those few words help much, but I think maybe they do. I think that authenticity is borderline impossible to pin down, and it is all about what appears to be authentic. Kurt Cobain came across as "real" but Michael Jackson didn't. Does that mean KC's songs were more from the heart than MJ's? I suspect they might have been, but we can't be sure.

"It means precisely what the speaker wants it to." Yep.

Authenticity seems to be about announcing - whether explicitly or through signals you give off - that you are authentic. A singer songwriter does this by dressing-down in scruffy clothes and singing sad personal songs... but the truth might be that their authentic self is chinos and deck shoes and songs about how amazing it is to have a £5m trust fund care of Hedge Fund daddy or how wonderful it is to be able to eat at £200 a head restaurants.

To my mind in the context of living your life authenticity is about doing what you want to do, not what is expected of you or you are told to do; it is about not pretending to be something you're not.

It seems to me that trans people (and fake tan, dubai holiday influencers) are all about proclaiming authenticity in order to deflect from the fact that pretending to be the sex you're not and posting filtered IG photos are the very definition of inauthenticity.

I think it's intended for situations like a woman who is actually a lesbian but feels she has to live a heterosexual life, or for someone who feels they have to do a corporate job to keep their parents happy but would rather do something creative. I think that meaning is fair enough, it's just been stretched rather a long way in recent years

@GCRich that’s interesting….in musical terms being ‘authentic’ can mean copying people who came before you. Especially in jazz/blues. So in that sense authenticity isn’t necessarily something to aim for as then nothing will change and move forward.

Maybe being ‘authentically a woman’ is the same - it’s copying stereotypes, rather than expanding the definition of what it means to be a man who eschews toxic masculinity.

@Hiphopfrogger

It means that individuals act in their own self interest….:..sound familiar?

Thats because its just Ann Rand repackaged for the Gen Y generation.

It assumes that there exists a coherent unitary true Self deep down inside all of us, if only we could access it and live by it. Which is self-regarding nonsense. We all have many aspects of self - one for work, one for our parents, one for our most intimate relationships etc. Some are wise and adult, some are damaged, some are vulnerable and childlike. And so on.

Well, making authentic jazz or blues is a reasonable aim... but I'd be more impressed by a musician who writes great songs in a style that no-one has heard before. One musician might be an authentic 1950s style blues musician, another musician might see their music as authentic because it has that 1950s blues honesty, whilst also being 100% new and what the musician wants to do.

Surely we can all agree that an authentic cheesecake is a wonderful thing, even if the recipe is old?

But yeah, good point. I hadn't relly made the connection. A TW is authentically a woman in the way that an 18 year old is an authentic 1950s blues artist - doing the things you need to do, showing the things you need to show, to "prove" that you fit in the box marked "50s style blues" or "woman" despite being definitively not a 1950s musician nor a woman. An entirely reasonable take on authenticity, but not anywhere near the more honest and personal authenticity that comes from an 18 year old musician trying to find their own unique voice, or a feminine man actually "expanding the bandwidth of what it means to be a man" (rather than pretending that they can expand the bandwidth of what it is to be a woman).

For what it's worth with music (art, not real) my view is that authenticity is meaningless. All that matters for people who like authenticity is that the music comes across as authentic. It would smewhat spoil Nirvana to find out that Cobain was actually a trust fund kid with good mental health who was happy as larry in his personal life and was actually murdered not a suicide victim. But on the other hand it wouldn't detract from the power of the songs to get across emotions and appear authentic.

But with people not making art I want personal authenticity. I want people who are true to themselves and others, people who don;t lie to themselves about what they are and then try to convince others of the lie.

I think it will mean different things to different people depending on their age and experiences.

I am actively trying to “discover” my authentic self. I have been married for a very long time to someone who really just wanted me to be another version of him. It seems normal that in a marriage you could just be yourself, but not so.
So instead of saying, can we have a smallish dinner party instead of a great big party, because I don’t like small talk, and circulating amongst near strangers - you suck it up and smile. Then you are told “see you enjoyed it really, I knew you would”. And you can’t say actually no I didn’t, but I was doing my best.

Then apply that to mostly everything, and you become the fakest person you know. So being authentic for me is setting boundaries, and actually being proud of my simple introverted self.

Surely it’s better to consider what we DO, how we affect the people around us and what we can bring to the world, than just who we ARE.

"We are what we repeatedly do." - Aristotle

When I first thought about actually how much time I spent on various activities it revealed to me the reality of what I did was quite far from the somewhat idealized independent and free-spirited self I imagined myself to be. Aristotle follows up by saying we should be cultivating the habits of excellence. For myself, realizing my irredeemable flaws, I've followed the more realistic path of trying to cultivate "better" thoughts and habits.

I like this.

In my youth I played guitar in various (amateur/ semi pro) rock and roll bands. I spent ages trying to get an "authentic" acoustic sound on stage. Unsuccessfully. I eventually realised that what I was doing was silly. The acoustic guitar is a chamber instrument, and not really designed for loud public performances. "Authenticity" is the last thing you should look for. Sounding good is a much better aim.

Authenticity as "not pretending" is great. But authenticity as a refusal to compromise with reality is a pigheaded self indulgence.

"I’m trying to not say anything that would get this thread deleted, but it seems this obsession with gender is so terribly inward looking, and something most women just don’t actually have any time for. Or do I have it all wrong?"

Have to agree. The reason though is different versus a trans person. For yourself, and most of the population, they never question their gender, as something inside is not in conflict. So its not something you would expect to self examine in great detail. This is very different for trans people - the internal/external gender conflict causes intense examination, and therefore self focus to try and resolve what feels authentic to them - how they can live their best life.

From what I have seen, very few trans peeps have an option but to explore their gender conflict and find what feels authentic. To not do so, keeps that feeling of dysphoria keeping coming back.

Authentic also is important in a clinical sense. The real life experience that trans people need to go through to access medical care and be taken seriously, often means clinicians taking a look at whether they are living true to their internal needs, and then whether medical intervention is appropriate. RLE requires exactly that - to use the facilities in alignment with one's expressed authentic gender.

Most non trans people don't get it - as they have never had to deal with a conflict between body presentation and how they feel inside. Once you know and interact with trans people you can get a good feel for it - but never know it in its true sense of course.

Well I suppose then, TW would see themselves as having spent their lives pretending to be men, and want to now live authentically as women. But without a definition of ‘woman’ (and I’ve never seen a definition except for the blindingly obvious adult human female), then what does that even mean?

to return to the music metaphor, you can try to play authentic 1940s jazz because there a certain fingerprints that musicians used at that time and you can copy. I’m not sure the same can be said for ‘woman’.

I think today it mostly means to pretend to be something you are not and force everyone else to go along with your fantasy as well.

I think I would rather aim for originality. I think I can work that out whereas authentic needs a template to compare with. Simple example:
DH likes classic cars, he judges a rebuild or renovation on use of original parts. Not modern copies, Stainless steel as built not chrome.
Friends are converting a caravan. It will look from the outside as a 1965 model but it will have modern furniture, plumbing and insulation. It their design and therefore original.
A young cousin spends hours on social media, and keeps trying to copy celeb styles.
The contestants on Sewing Bee did original work. It was authentically theirs.

Have I just argued myself in a circle? 😀

It's like being a lesbian who feels that she has to refer to her partner rather than her girlfriend.

Living authentically means wearing lots of makeup, having thousands of pounds of surgery and synthetic hormones pumped into your body.

To me, living authentically means being at peace with myself and how I treat other people and interact with the world. Integrity, fairness and honesty about who I am, not trying to lead anyone to believe that I’m something I’m not. Not taking from anyone that I wouldn’t have given the same time/money/effort to myself. Just being real about who I am and what I’m about. Making decisions and going about my life in ways that wouldn’t be uncomfortable/cringe to have relayed back to me in 5 years, 10 years, 50 years time. Being able to stand by my current self and her decisions/behaviour no matter what stage of life I’m at in future.