9. On Authenticity
Thinking about meaning is daunting.
Previously on The Grey Life, I framed the idea of ‘meaning’ as recognising that we all have the freedom to choose the meaning for our lives. I made the case that this is our purpose. It’s our job to discover, define, and then put into action our ‘essence’.
But I’ll be the first to admit that this can feel confusing, and scary. It’s a messy business.
What if what we decide to define turns out to be wrong?
What if the actions we carry out in pursuit of that meaning don’t get us to where we thought we wanted to be?
It’s these thoughts that so often stop us from venturing down this path in the first place. Because it all feels so uncertain and nebulous. It feels like something we’ll never be able to grasp fully.
So today we’re going to explore how living in this state of flux can not only be a good thing; it’s a requirement for getting to where we think we want to be.
Our lives are destined to be full of uncertainty.
The harder you fight against it, the more you lose control.
To start, I want to unpack a philosophical term - Existentialism - so bear with me. And let’s dive into how it can help us to think about tackling these shifting feelings.
Existentialism rose to prominence in the late 1800s and across the early 1900s as a challenging new way of viewing the world, and our role within it. Jean-Paul Sartre was one of its most well-known characters. As a French novelist, playwright, and philosopher, Sartre was not one to mince his words or hide behind weak ideas.
He asked, against the prevailing religious thoughts of the time and preceding centuries; what if we are born without a pre-ordained meaning, but rather our life is about choosing it for ourselves?
Sartre believed that recognising this idea is critical to truly becoming ‘free’.
His idea of ‘freedom’ is putting yourself in a position of choosing for yourself whatever it is you want to prioritise in life. In other words, choosing what you want to construct your values around. Maybe you’ll choose to build values around creativity, or honesty, or fairness, or the biggest house in the suburb. It’s up to you. It’s your choice. (Spoiler: some values are better than others)
But he recognised how difficult this process is. It’s why he famously bracketed the thought with the phrase “Man is condemned to be free”.
He challenges us to adopt the position that we are free to make any choices we want to. But we also have to accept that we are wholly responsible for those choices. And, therefore, this idea of completely free, infinite choice becomes scary. It’s really difficult.
For many, we struggle to decide what to watch on Netflix when faced with rail upon rail of content, let alone what we want from life.
Being ‘free’ creates anxiety; we can choose to be anything.
To understand what Sartre is referring to, I want you to try a short exercise. Puff your chest out, channel your inner motivational speaker, look up and out into the distance and say to yourself, “I can choose to be whatever I want to be.”
Now, change your stance.
Droop your shoulders, bring your fingers to your chin, cast your eyes down and whisper to yourself, “I can choose to be whatever I want to be.” That feeling of inner anguish, and the pressure of knowing that we can choose our own path, is what Sartre is referring to when he talks about being ‘condemned to be free’.
So why pursue this freedom if it’s seemingly only going to cause us anguish? Sartre believed the trade-offs hidden within the process itself make it worthwhile. (Pain is necessary for growth, after all.) Let’s explore why.
One of Sartre’s greatest fears was the concept of ‘living in bad faith’. To him, this meant:
Living in Bad Faith: accepting a perspective or situation as true because it is convenient, even though we know deep down it doesn’t seem to fit. It is believing in the stories we want to hear, or tell ourselves, rather than facing hard questions or situations as they actually are.
It’s acknowledging that it’s easier to believe that we ‘have no choices’ than to admit that we’ve chosen the wrong ones, or that we are afraid of choosing at all.
Maybe I’ve always felt that I might want to be a dancer, or a poet, or a bee keeper. But over time, I’ve told myself that I don’t have the genes for it, or the time, or a set of hives is the first thing I’d buy if I won the lottery.
Accepting bad faith is to choose long term agony over short term discomfort. It’s choosing to accept a lifetime of persistent, nagging thoughts of ‘What If?’ (what would it feel like to dance or write how I think I can?) rather than facing up to the short-term pains of sacrifice and effort in pursuit of an uncertain goal or outcome (e.g. putting in the physical effort to train for a recital, or pen to paper over and over again in pursuit of the perfect words).
In this case, Sartre wants us to avoid being able to use your unconscious mind to excuse bad behaviour, or tell yourself these lies. In other words, if you choose not to do something, it’s because you have deliberately made that decision, not concocted seemingly innocent stories in your mind as to why you haven’t taken it on.
Sartre wants to do away with this unconscious mind because it’s just a way to escape from the anguish of how truly free we are. There’s no shortage of creative ways for people to excuse away this freedom. Drugs, alcohol, procrastination, self-doubt over all of our own insecurities - these are all ways for me to find convenient excuses to evade the question of ‘what do I truly want to do, or be?’
His views centred on the idea that if I am to accept that I can choose who I want to be, then I have to learn to get comfortable with the idea of ‘it’s OK to change’.
I have to accept that I won’t always have certainty in life. This may be scarier, but it is the only way to craft my meaning, to construct and live out my values, and ‘be free’.
Figuring out who am I requires me to think about who I’m not.
Figuring out what I want to do, or be, starts with a self examination of who I am. This means asking tough questions of myself, and being honest with the answers. But unfortunately it doesn’t end there, because that’s never the full story, no matter how honest I think I’m being.
If I feel that I have a strong sense of who I am, it’s likely that this is the version that I only share with my friends and family, and don’t generally share with the wider world. I may very well be subject to the same stories and misinterpretations of that true self that I inject into my perceived self in front of others. In other words, I can easily lie to myself, and be unaware of it.
Around my friends and family I might truly feel creative and light of heart because that’s how I am when I wrap myself in the security and sanctity that being with them provides. But around strangers, those same expressions might come across as tentative and unsure. They might be interpreted as efforts to figure out how I fit into a situation or context.
But this tension is unavoidable because there are two versions of us that exist at any one time.
The first version is what we’ll call the Fact version. This version consists of a collection of facts that are true about us at any given moment. You’re 5ft8” tall. You’re a plumber. You eat ice cream every Sunday afternoon after leaving it outside of the freezer for 5 minutes. The Fact version never tells the full story of us, though, because we’re far more complex than this. We’re not pure Fact version.
But the other version is the Could-Be version. This represents our ability to change. You could-be a writer, if you found the time. You could-be the sort of person who eats ice cream for breakfast, if you cast aside your routine.
Part of understanding what we are, is also understanding what we are not yet. I am what I am (Fact version). But I’m also not what I’m not yet (Could-Be version).
To live solely in either state, is to live in Bad Faith.
To live only in the Fact Version of ourselves, is to accept a fixed way of life. It is to say, I am a person who is defined by the clothes I wear, my haircut, who I vote for, my job, family and hobbies. We have a tendency to gravitate towards this trap, because it’s easier to define ourselves within the Fact version. We make proclamations of what we are: “I am an accountant. I am a religious person. I am a Brexiteer.” Doing so means we don’t have to ask the question of what our Could-Be version might look like. We give ourselves a ‘fixed’ essence in order to justify our existence and run from the uncertain possibilities that we’re haven’t found the courage to face.
The Could-Be state is there to inspire us, to provoke us to find new ways to grow. But living only in the Could-Be state is an illusion. You’re none of those things you think about until you actually are them, until you start doing something to make them real. Spending your life telling yourself that you could be a best-selling author, when you find the time, is a different kind of bad faith.
Living in either of these states creates anxiety. But anxiety is not something to be feared, it is there to motivate us to action. Anxiety alerts us to the fact that we have an apprehension, a nervousness, about something uncertain in the future - so that we can choose our next course of action.
Charlie Brown is stuck in an anxiety loop created by living only in the Fact Version of himself. He’s too afraid to take any action towards what could move him into the Could-Be version i.e. talking to the Little Red-Haired Girl. His anxiety is telling him to act - but he can’t escape the Fact Version of himself (“Nobody likes me”, “if someone as blah as I am tried to talk to her”) in order to do so. He is committed to a lifetime of anguish from living in Bad Faith. Until he does something about it. Until he does the thing. And talks to the red-haired girl.
If I have lived too long in the Fact Version of myself, a fixed state of believing I am a certain version of myself, I run the risk of having my world view being totally upset by factors beyond my control. If my view of myself is “I am a runner”, what happens when I get chronically injured from a freak street sign falling on me, and cannot run again? Who am I then?
Perhaps in that moment I see myself as being the great guitar player I always dreamed of being instead. But until I invest time, effort and money into purchasing a guitar, taking guitar lessons, practicing until my fingers bleed, I am neither of these things. I am no longer a runner, but I am not yet a great guitar player. I am something inbetween.
But I go out and rent a guitar to try it out. I strum a few chords and YouTube a DIY-guitar instructional video. I carry out actions to perhaps become an awesome guitar player in the future. But that future is very uncertain. Scary, even. But, in full knowledge of this uncertaintly, I persist in my efforts.
It is getting used to this very moment, acknowledging that I am not my Fact version of who I used to be, nor am I yet the Could-Be version of who I think I might want to be, that is crucial to being authentic with ourselves. I am in the middle. It is in this moment that Sartre would say I am living with Authenticity.
Because what ultimately reveals our true self, is what we do.
What we do, the actions that we take, influences how those around us perceive us. And they play that back to us. They tell us that they are proud of how I’ve responded to my setback. How exciting it must be to learn a new skill. They can see that I’m improving on the guitar, but reveal with a friendly laugh that I’ve still got a long way to go.
This is where the Fact and Could-Be versions of ourselves meet. This is where we reveal our true selves.
Through our actions, we are constantly creating and recreating ourselves. There is no end game, as these actions never end. Because if I were to perfect playing the guitar, and start telling everyone my new story that “Formally a runner, I am now a renowned guitar player”, I have simply adopted this altered Fact version of myself - guitar player. Which may serve me for a while, until it doesn’t. Just like the running. And I have to start again.
We are constantly caught between the two states of Fact and Could-Be versions of ourselves. This is the tension of our life.
Accepting this and to carry out actions towards our goals in spite of it, is to live a life, not in bad faith, but in authenticity.
And this is the first step to figuring how to define our own meaning.