performance vs. authenticity
or: me as a function of you part 2, electric boogaloo
the strange thing about the internet is that, for the most part, the average person has unprecedented amounts of control over what others may or may not perceive about them. all it takes is not posting about something on social media or broadcasting a certain ideology for one to masquerade otherwise, because we are limited to what we know of each other in these weird little digital pockets of the world. filters can distort faces and bodies, digital manipulation is everyone’s new favorite pastime, and all one has to do is just practice a little caution to curate the perfected image of oneself on the internet. honestly, that can be really cool – it’s kind of like getting to play sims with yourself.
and yet we somehow translate this to a certain agency that grants us the permission to attack each other more mercilessly on the internet. in “the real world,” we have very little of this power to define oneself and portray a curated version of oneself, but for some reason there’s a different kind of grace granted to strangers on the street than strangers on the internet. we don’t see people pointing fingers and publicly shaming a guy for reading a book at a cafe when we’re out and about in our daily lives, and yet if he were to post about enjoying a book at a cafe on the internet, he is branded as a performative male, only reading for some ulterior motive of being perceived more acceptingly by female audiences.
while i think there is some validity to the ongoing rebellion of women pointing out performative men (i can’t tell you how many times a guy has done something shitty, like pretended to like the books i did or worse pretended he was gay so that he might get “closer” to me), i also can’t help but think about the label of “performative”, which we are so quick to throw around these days. what is performance? what is authenticity? and who is the arbiter of both of these things?
i grew up with two of the most judgmental people with unwarranted entitlement to the biggest superiority complexes you could have ever imagined. this meant a plethora of negative effects in my daily life: every part of my being was constantly being judged harshly and criticized to the fullest extent, and i felt constant shame at the way my family unit moved through the world with their nose up at everyone else (for absolutely no good reason at all mind you! they were not in fact better than everyone else! they were just human beings too!). the good news is that i walked away from this with a keen sense of the harshest way all of my actions and appearances could ever be perceived. and it’s wildly alarming to see that this cruelty is the general direction in which internet culture is developing.
if i have learned anything from this upbringing, it is that it’s very very very difficult to live day in and day out having to constantly be aware of every aspect of your being so that you might avoid the judgment and harshness of others. acquiescing to imposed norms is the easiest way to go. it saves you the time and energy and mental gymnastics of having to guess at what others want to see from you. it saves you from the hurt if you do try your hand at being yourself, only to be ridiculed in the end.
you know that trend we’re seeing these days where people are all wearing the same things? the few clothing options we have here in the west all put out variations of the same clothes, and thus we see troves of teens walking around in matching outfits, which was cute and fun until you realized that the herd mentality had gotten to them, and oh god we have to save the kids from defining themselves by the level at which they match with others. there is safety in numbers, yes, but that’s for walking home alone at night and fighting oppressive governments, not your shopping cart, bestie! individuality and uniqueness are being stamped out for the safety of being part of a collective, but this is not the collective we need! we need community of differences, we need to be able to meet others of different backgrounds and appearances and beliefs to expand ourselves! if we all just become this monolithic society, how are we at all better off than we were during the (very depressing) middle ages?
i think the worst part is that they’re all emulating what the celebrities wear, what they drink, the skincare they use, and establishing that as the norm – a whole personality. a celebrity (i’ll not platform her, but i will comment on her nonsense) posted a video wearing a facemask and eating sushi and suddenly it became a trend. everyone had to have that exact facemask. everyone had to eat sushi while wearing that facemask. why? because they wanted to emulate that moment. that’s it. that’s the reason. and people make this their whole personalities – always keeping up with the trends of celebrities and social media and never really liking something because they actually like the thing for a reason other than some celebrity tangentially used it once. why? because this is apparently socially acceptable. enough of us doing it and not poo-pooing it means a greenlight, i guess. we are safe to post these things, to posture ourselves this way, because of the collective approval.
this is a nightmare, and i don’t know why more people aren’t freaking out about this. we shouldn’t allow uniqueness and individuality to be things only accessible to celebrities and social elites – everyone should be celebrated for their uniqueness and individuality! how did we get to this awful place where this is acceptable?
(thanks for asking, i think i have an answer)
when i moved out and learned that all of the things that were labelled ‘weird’ and ‘bad’ in my household were just Normal Human Things, it was incredibly freeing. for the first time in my life, i could be myself without this ever-present judgment that whatever i was doing was Wrong and Bad. i dyed my hair stupid colors. i wore unflattering clothes. i pursued my interests without limit. i became myself, and my god was i happy. i think that’s a large part of why i look back on my college days so fondly, and while i’ll probably do the same for this era in my late 20’s where i’m being ungovernably me. to live for yourself is not selfish, but gratifying, particularly in a society where you are asked to give, give, give at the expense of so much of yourself.
social media, whether we like it or not, has become to grandmaster of widespread western society and culture (i cannot speak to other parts of the world because alas i am Unfortunately American). and social media has become a place where everyone has suddenly also gained unwarranted entitlement to the biggest superiority complexes you could have ever imagined. we can comment on anything and everything, sending it out into the ether and for some reason thinking that every single thing we say is of the utmost importance and so we must share it and make sure that it’s seen and heard. god forbid someone posts about a book they liked without you making it very clear that you hated this book!
i have this habit when i am on social media where i’ll gauge how i reacted to a post versus what they say in the comments (a different flavor of the herd mentality, and i would be remiss to say that it’s something i do that i’m not proud of, because i’m actively criticizing it). and every time i open up the comments, ostensibly to corroborate my experience, i always see at least two or three erroneous comments that are just so out of pocket. why do you feel the need to tell someone you hated something they’re enjoying? how the hell is that relevant to the post at hand? would you seriously say that to someone if they were standing in front of you right now rather than being a thousand degrees removed on the screen? do you not realize the damage you are doing by telling someone they’re Wrong and Bad? do you not know how this won’t make them think critically about this, but rather just hide with their tail between their legs, effectively silencing them?
the audacity is baffling, and perhaps a post for another time, but i think that this gets to a part of the root of the problem – everyone is so quick to share their opinions, especially the negative ones, that existing on the internet and by extension, in real life. i’ll stick with the book review example – the stigma about reading ‘the right kind of books’ and ‘reading critically always all the time’ is real, and it’s doing some really dumb gatekeeping for a lot of folks. there is this active policing that we do that extends far beyond genuine care and warning. it’s no longer that we’re just warning people when an author has behaved badly, or that there’s content in the book that is bigoted. people are bashing other people’s tastes based on their own and feeling very comfortable with doing so at the expense of a lot of readers’ comfort.
and so we get the same ten books constantly circulated on the internet. everyone is reading the same ten books because the internet writ large has decided that this is an okay book to like. all of the other ones have been written off because enough people decided to be assholes in the comment section. don’t get me started on what happens to you if you don’t happen to like one of these ten books. here we are, sheep with reading tastes and wardrobes and diets decidedly entirely at the behests of strangers on the internet, with absolutely no regard to what one actually likes. authenticity has been sacrificed on the pyre of social acceptance and it’s actually incredibly depressing. how are we all not so sad, the same way i was before i learned what it was to actually be me? how is it that we’re all okay with being facsimiles of each other, criticizing anyone who busts out from the norm?
but wait – isn’t it all performative?
i, and many others, have spoke ad nauseum about the very strange 2026 analog life trend, so i won’t belabor the point too much about how hypocritical and oxymoronic it all is. there’s a lot of irony to the act of posting about how offline you are (and yes, i know i’m guilty of this, you can include me on the list of people to attack with pitchforks and torches). the very act of posting means you are not, decidedly, offline, and that you must verify your offline-ness with people online. i do think it does spark a really interesting conversation about authenticity, though, and how authenticity is decided by a jury of peers known as the judgmental mean girls of the internet.
if you must post about your offline-ness in order to validate the fact that you have been offline, it puts a strange emphasis on the online sphere being the decider of what you are or aren’t. you are putting yourself at the mercy of strangers on the internet to define you as a person, rather than letting yourself be defined by your own standards. and i get it – it’s hard not to exist on the internet, to document evidence of your life in that way that has become so ingrained in us now. post about it. that’s the only way it happened, right?
i think what people who are labeling things as performative are getting at is that one should actively engage with something entirely removed from the internet and also not have to post directly about it on the internet for validation and recognition. don’t tell me you’ve been offline, tell me about the things you learned, and the way you grew from what you learned. don’t say you’ve undertaken a personal curriculum, show me the silly little thing that you created or expound on some niche subject. in other words – show, don’t tell. otherwise, it feels like an act you’re putting on so that you might give off the air that you are doing the thing you’re claiming to do, without actually doing the thing.
but, as we’ve established, it is so hard to exist in the online social sphere in this authentic, unique way. nobody gives a damn about my unnecessarily deep knowledge of hieronymus bosch artworks. my videos won’t get views if i’m not reading what everyone else is reading. the internet only wants to hear one thing, and that’s whatever trend has a death grip on its collective brain at any given moment. so here we are in this ugly ouroboros of judgment and belittling that has resulted in the erasure of all the human quirks that were once cherished and valued. your authenticity is determined by an amorphous mob of beings on the internet who will only accept you if you share their every belief and interest, and will shame you with labels of performance and inauthenticity otherwise. i know, the irony kills me, because is that really authenticity at all?
so here we are, policing each other’s authenticity while never really allowing anyone to be authentic on the internet, at least not successfully. what an odd decision we’ve made as a society. what a depressing one, at that.
i’d be interested to hear what you think about how we can be authentic in this day and age. i’m looking into learning more about carl jung’s theory of individuation because of this, in pursuit of separating myself more effectively from the internet collective and of moving into a collective much more beneficial to my existence as a human being. because don’t get me wrong, herds can be great, but let’s not become echo chambers of the same two thoughts.