On Authenticity

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Moderna Museet, December 2024

Quick Summary: In this Substack, I look at how we should value authenticity. I suggest authenticity is overrated. Authenticity can be restrictive, and its opposite – pretension – can be just as brave, and just as valuable. I think that we value authenticity because of the close connection with LGBT progress (good) and because social media demands a single consistent self (bad).

We think authenticity is a good thing. Like ‘natural’, it has, over time, quietly come to be synonymous with ‘good’. We take the demand to ‘be authentic’ as obvious, and rarely follow up with another question – why? Like ‘natural’, ‘authentic’ isn’t necessarily good. Natural is often good, but not always. Injections are unnatural, as are skyscrapers and the delicious E-numbers of Haribo Smurfs. And though ‘authenticity’ is often good, the opposite – which I’ll call ‘pretension’ (even if this sounds like something in your ACL) can be better.

Authenticity is thought of as good because of the LGBT movement. For a long time, the freedom to live authentically was something to fight for, and the bravery to live authentically – love who you love, live as you are – something to be admired. So authenticity is closely connected to the bravery and freedom of LGBT+ activists. But it’s not a necessary connection. Authenticity has often been good, but that doesn’t mean it has to be. Take drag. Drag is, at its core, inauthentic. A drag queen is not trans. They’re doing drag. It’s a pretence, but a glorious and valuable one. In a world where we’re constantly enjoined to be authentic, the willingness ‘to sail gaily in brave feathers right in the teeth of dreary convention’ can be braver.

Despite this, we’re quick to snap the categories of ‘authentic’ and ‘good’ onto one another, and to do the opposite – equate the inauthentic ‘pretension’ with ‘bad’. Authenticity is ‘being your true self’, the ‘real you’, unfiltered, unmediated, unchanged. To be inauthentic is to commit the wrong of betraying this ‘true self’ and adopt a mask instead. I think part of the disparagement of pretension relates to trust. ‘Authentic’ suggests a consistency, a fixed and stable self - and hence an ability for others to know who you are and what they are getting.

This is why we want an authentic politician. Authenticity allows us to be confident that the person who sits in office is the one we voted in. But there’s wriggle room. I’d love a politician who rejected the demands to be authentic and embraced their ability to pretend. Who says that I’ll put on my work hat, do a good job, switch seamlessly in how I talk to world leaders, to businessmen and the electorate - and be a more effective politician because of it. If a politician did this, I feel like we would care, but I wonder if we should? It’s not dishonest. And so you can be pretentious without being dishonest if you are honest about your intention and capacity to pretend.

You can also be pretentious without being hypocritical or snobbish. Both are pretension plus something. In the case of snobbery, it’s an excessive concern about money; in the case of hypocrisy, it’s a desire to contradict what you assert elsewhere. But if you’re being pretentious without being a liar, snob or hypocrite, are you really doing anything wrong?

I don’t think you are, and I think you can be doing something right. Pretension is giving something a go, another ‘inauthentic’ self. And through lightly trying on each of these hats, we learn about the new ones that could fit. It’s how we grow. Trying on hats is exactly what children do when they play, but we don’t give this play, this pretence, the negative connotations that we give ‘pretentious’. This is possibly because we don’t expect kids to know the ‘authentic self’ we accuse the pretentious or inauthentic of betraying. But I certainly don’t feel like I have a single ‘authentic self’. I’m figuring it out, and always will be - and pretension helps me do this. Pretension is what allows us to ‘fake it til we make it’. It helps us to go beyond the boundaries of who we are right now, to refuse to remain static, overreach even if we end up looking stupid, try on that hat, even if it may not fit.

I worry that constant demands to be authentic contain a note of ‘get back in your box, get rid of those airs and graces’. Be you, as you are now, static, and still. Social media is full of these demands for authenticity. At least on my Instagram, authenticity is everything. My Reels seem like an Authenticity-Off, a race to open up and reveal ever more truths about peoples lives, struggles, fears. But this authenticity is a kind of stasis. Social media relies on one single self – a personal brand, the consistent feed, the ‘you’ that is displayed. It can’t hack pretentiousness, with its light, flighty flurry of different selves. There’s a reel going around at the moment bemoaning ‘that friend who can’t decide on their lifestyle’. The reel blips between gritty nightclubs, serene park scenes, extreme sports and more - and it suggests this is a bad thing. Social media wants one thing, one you and so it celebrates the “authentic”, with all its reliable consistency.

This is one of the reasons why I deleted my Instagram before going to university. I looked at the pouty, raving person on my feed and thought about what people doing a quick social media stalk would think. Lots of people – interesting, eccentric, quieter people – might look at it and decide I wasn’t their cup of tea. And I wanted to know them! My feed wasn’t inauthentic in the sense of being a lie. I do like raves and parties and cafés with funky neon lights. It wasn’t that this wasn’t the person that I wanted to be, but that this wasn’t the only person I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be pinned to the mast – I wanted to be pretentious, in the flexible, delicious sense that we all are – to have many selves, and flit between them freely.

So I think we should be careful about how much emphasis we place on authenticity (setting aside the fact that a single ‘authentic’ self might not even exist). We’re all a bit pretentious. None of us are a single ‘authentic’ self all the time, and we’ve all experienced the odd self-splitting when mixing different friend groups. I think demands for authenticity stem from a desire to simplify, and schematise people - you’re a THIS! But that is a pretty rubbish thing to want. Better to celebrate the brave feathers of pretension instead.

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There’s an element of self interest in all of this. In case this Substack wasn’t proof enough, man oh man can I be pretentious. I was home for the holidays, which meant sleeping in my childhood bedroom that bears the scars of a Very Pretentious Teenager. The writing is literally on the wall because I scrawled mind-maps and diagrams a lá Violet Baudelaire (if you know you know). Above my scrawls is the sticky residue of the Yeats poems I cut into flowers and stuck up. Below it are a few small square mirrors I peeled off a disco ball. I remember cutting my finger on one and looking sadly at my tiny blood-spattered reflection as I thought Big Deep Thoughts about the Self and Vanity. That is an impressive density of pretentiousness per metre squared.

But sometimes this willingness to be pretentious has paid dividends. I’ve had a rough couple of weeks (personal things that, for once, I am not going to share on the internet). And I’ve been reading poetry. Nothing fancy, a collection of Poems on the Underground, the Poems that make Grown Men Cry, the always simple and lovely Mary Oliver. Doing so could be called pretentious, but it’s also helped me, a lot. And maybe too much pretentious-bashing would stop other people trying something similar. (I really loved Sometimes, Ithka, Amor Constante, Bedecked and Keys to The Doors.)

I also read ‘Pretentiousness’ by Dan Fox before writing this Substack. The Lawrence ‘brave feathers’ quote is from there, and there’s another from Crisp I really liked - that ‘in an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.’ Check it out for a much more academic/ well-researched take on lots of the ideas in this post.

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