Behaving in accord with your true self may also bring on the disfavor of others: Must you admit to being a Democrat when meeting with your conservative clients? Does your wife really want to know whether you like her new dress? "Opening oneself up to an intimate makes one vulnerable to rejection or betrayal," Kernis and Goldman observe. It can feel better to be embraced as an impostor than dumped for the person you really are.
Authenticity also requires making conscious, informed choices based on accurate self-knowledge. Like the existentialists, today's psychologists emphasize the role of active choice in creating an authentic life: a willingness to evaluate nearly everything that you do. That's no mean feat in a culture where even simple acts—you can dye your hair any color you want, your television carries more than 500 channels, and Starbucks advertises more than 87,000 ways to enjoy a cup of coffee—require conscious consideration among alternatives.
Such freedom can be exhausting. Baumeister has found that deliberation, no matter how trivial, exacts a cost in psychic energy, of which we have only a finite amount. His studies show that authentic action demands a certain amount of psychological exertion that depletes the self's executive function. "It's harder to be authentic," he says. "It takes more work."
Leary sees it as an outright burden, part of the perennial longing and doubt that he calls "the curse of the self." So here we are, stuck with our self-awareness, which also compels us to continually define and refine our sense of ourselves as unique individuals against a background of conformity, superficiality, exhibitionism, and lots of other unique individuals.
But wait, there's more. In order to realize an authentic life, says Kernis, one often has to set aside hedonic well-being—the kind of shallow, short-lived pleasure we get from, say, acquiring things—for eudaimonic well-being, a deeper, more meaningful state in which gratification is not usually immediate. Sissies need not apply.
The fact is that we tend to flourish under the most challenging circumstances, and enduring the pain and confusion that often accompany them can bring out the best—and most authentic—in us, fostering such deeply satisfying qualities as wisdom, insight, and creativity. But our cultural climate is filled with an alluring array of distractions, from online gambling to video games, that often turn out to be junk food for the mind.
Too Rigid for Our Own Good
But the really hard work, according to Cope and others, is the amount of ego-wrangling required to contact the core self. One of the biggest barriers to authentic behavior, he says, is the arbitrary and rigid self-image that so many of us nurture but which in fact distorts experience and limits self-knowledge. "Oftentimes, the very first line of defense you get with the folks who say, 'I'm leading an inauthentic life,' is that they're living life according to a fixed set of views and beliefs about how they should be."
A man at a dinner party admits that he married his first wife "because, well, you have to get married sometime, right?" (Actually, you don't.) A composer who sets music to blockbuster films complains that they are too commercial, but is unwilling to forego such movies' wide audiences and big paychecks for work on more meaningful projects. In each case, the individual may be guided by unexamined assumptions about what constitutes responsibility, satisfaction, even success.
Kernis contends that we each acquire a mixed set of shoulds, oughts, and have-to's while still too young to process them. They are neither fully conscious nor deeply considered but are acquired through convention and the expectations of others. Getting beyond these arbitrary strictures often demands the kind of soul-searching that most of us put off or avoid entirely. In fact, much of the work that people do in cognitive and behavioral therapy is to hold such beliefs up to the light and examine where they came from, a necessary step to resolving the anxiety or depression they typically create and that drive people to seek help.
"Jung says the first thing you should do is take a look at those things that are dark in you, the things that are problematical, that you don't like," says psychotherapist and former monk Thomas Moore, author of A Life at Work. "You have to be willing to look at things that don't fit snugly into the image you have of what you would like to be."
Failures R Us
Becoming authentic, then, means accepting not only contradiction and discomfort but personal faults and failures as well. Problematic aspects of our lives, emotions, and behaviors—the times we've yelled at the kids, lusted after the babysitter, or fallen back on our promises to friends—are not breaches of your true self, Moore insists. They're clues to the broader and more comprehensive mystery of selfhood. "In fact," he notes, "we are all very subtle and very complex, and there are forces and resources within us that we have no control over. We will never find the limits of who we are.
"People carry around a heavy burden of not feeling authentic," he says, "because they have failed marriages and their work life hasn't gone the way it should, and they've disappointed everybody, including themselves. When people think of these as just failures, as opposed to learning experiences, they don't have to feel the weight of their lives or the choices they've made. That disowning creates a division that becomes the sense of inauthenticity."
Tags:
affliction,
authentic self,
authenticity,
bathroom sink,
brushing your teeth,
career community,
coping skills,
ethicist,
human infants,
john portmann,
life choices,
lifelong search,
national consciousness,
oration,
personality,
presidential primaries,
self,
self images,
self recognition,
speechwriters,
true self,
well-being,
work relationships
