How To Be Authentic

The Authentic Guide to Authenticity

As everyone who’s spent more than thirty seconds on social media knows, it’s essential these days to be authentic.

But what does this mean?

Study after study has revealed that we humans are at best partially-conscious, a mixed bag of competing desires and inconsistent beliefs, actors unaware for the most part of our motivations. Our brains are excellent at creating an illusion of purposefulness after we’ve done something but that’s very different from the concept of us as having control over ourselves.

Just as the brain creates the illusion of a complete field of vision by hiding from our awareness the two holes that result from our optic nerves passing out through the back of each eyeball on their way to the brain, so our brains create an illusion of continuity and purposefulness in our daily lives. But many reputable studies have shown that by and large we act first, unaware of the trigger impulse, and then our brains invent a “why we’ve just done that” story so we don’t feel scarily out of control.

And as we’re a collection of competing impulses and desires (“I want to lose weight, I won’t eat that slice of pie in the fridge…. Ohmygod, it’s SOOOOO yummy!!!”) it’s obviously going to be quite a challenge for us to decide what it could possibly…