https://aeon.co/essays/a-history-of-authenticity-from-jesus-to-self-help-and-beyond
there is both transcript and audio of the article.
anybody into this type of thing, self searching and all that?
seems like programming run amuck, maybe I'm wrong..
interesting articleAuthenticity is a sham
From monks to existentialists and hipsters, the search for a true self has been a centuries-long project. Should we give it up?
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‘Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.’ This popular quip, often misattributed to Oscar Wilde, appears without any apparent irony in self-help books and blog posts celebrating authenticity. Understandably, they take the dictum to ‘be oneself’ as a worthy, nearly unassailable goal. Our culture is saturated with authenticity: we’re forever ‘finding ourselves’, ‘self-actualising’, ‘doing you’, ‘being real’, ‘going off the beaten path’, ‘breaking free of the crowd’. We spend our youth trying to figure out who we are; our later years trying to stay true to ourselves; and the time in-between in crisis about whether we are who we thought we were.
But ‘Wilde’s’ quote, inauthentic though it might be, suggests something foolish at the heart of authenticity. All this introspection can seem gratuitous. Why expend so much effort trying to be something we can’t help but be? ‘In the end,’ as the author David Foster Wallace put it, ‘you end up becoming yourself.’
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27 April 2021
there is both transcript and audio of the article.
anybody into this type of thing, self searching and all that?
seems like programming run amuck, maybe I'm wrong..