When your authenticity is an act, something’s gone wrong | Psyche Ideas

The meanings of authenticity that concern the inner life are now fading away. They are being replaced by a new concept of authenticity - ‘performative authenticity’.

Each person is enjoined to stand out from the crowd, to achieve something special and extraordinary. Authenticity has become an obligation. Being merely average or without a cultivated portfolio of attractive qualities, is a mark of failure – a mark of inauthenticity – regardless of your inner life and relation to self.

Performative authenticity is tied to economic success and social prestige, which means that your specialness has to be performed. In order for people to distinguish themselves, they must seek attention and visibility, and positively affect others with their self-representations.

In doing so, they have to take great care that their performance isn’t perceived as staged. To be ‘authentic’ they have to give the impression that they’re just being themselves. The effort has to appear effortless.

We can see how authenticity might be both in decline (in the inner mode) and in ascendance (in the performative mode) at the same time. The evidence for the decline of one might be a sign of the rise of the other.

Authenticity (in the inner mode) is being lost, as seemingly everyone has become their own unabashed publicist. People laid little stress on the need for introspection and faulted themselves, not for being too caught up in the superficialities of society, but for failing to meet its imperatives of success.