Apparently ‘authentic’ is word of the year.
Dec 26, 2023
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary just announced that ‘authentic’ is their ‘word of the year’.
Back in 2021 I wrote a piece about ‘Authenticity’. I thought I’d reconsider what I wrote back then. Does it still stand up, in a marketing world obsessed with selling ‘the real’ to consumers jaded by fakery?
Does it matter if the real is fake?
Is ‘authentic’ just another marketing term or branding tool?
Or does it still contain some intrinsic meaning — a meaning worth fighting for?
Perhaps the comment by comedian George Burns has become a new marketing gold-standard:
“The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
Merriam-Webster explains its choice of ‘authentic’ as word of the year is interesting:
This is the context in which the choice was made:
‘A high-volume lookup most years, ‘authentic’ saw a substantial increase in 2023, driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.’
They give an overview of current definitions:
‘Authentic has a number of meanings including “not false or imitation,” a synonym of real and actual; and also “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.” Although clearly a desirable quality, authentic is hard to define…’
They then go on to outline a range of contexts in which the word, these days, is used:
‘Authentic is often connected to identity, whether national or personal: words frequently modified by authentic include cuisine and dish, but also self and voice. Celebrities like singers Lainey Wilson, Sam Smith, and especially Taylor Swift all made headlines in 2023 with statements about seeking their “authentic voice” and “authentic self.” Headlines like Three Ways To Tap Into Taylor Swift’s Authenticity And Build An Eras-Like Workplace associate this quality with pop-culture superpower.’
Capitalism seems able to turn everything into its opposite. The word ‘sustainable’ — which includes within it the idea we should consume fewer resources on this finite planet — is used to make us feel guiltless about consuming more.
Facebook claims to connect people, but is creating and selling a metaverse where we’re all hidden behind (expensive) face-covering machines, isolated in virtual spaces, interacting only with other avatars.
Has authentic undergone capitalism’s inverse alchemy — by which gold is transmuted into glittery crap?
Merriam-Webster acknowledge that possibility:
Ironically, with “authentic content creators” now recognized as the gold standard for building trust, “authenticity” has become a performance.
Perhaps now we have to view claims of authenticity with the same cynicism we regard all the other bullshit thrown at us by people desperate to separate us from money we can ill-afford to spend.
That would be a shame.
I want to fight for authentic authenticity.
In Merriam-Webster’s defining of authentic, quoted above, is the phrase:
‘true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character’
This is important.
An integral part of authenticity is whether an object, action or experience, feels authentic.
Feeling is individual.
Authenticity, ultimately, is a subjective experience.
Even if something is absolutely real, if we don’t feel it to be so, it won’t impart to us a sense of its authenticity.
As (I believe) Anais Nin wrote:
‘We see the world not as it is, but as we are’.
I don’t want to be an easily manipulated consumer. I take hope from the possibility of being the real arbiter of authenticity. I get to decide what’s authentic.
Facts might tell me what’s real. I get to decide what’s authentic.
There’s a problem though.
Which me?
As I wrote in 2021:
‘We are different with different people and in different contexts.
What is it to be authentic?
Behave authentically.
Respond authentically.
Make an authentic offer.
Be who you really are.
What does this mean?
‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ (Walt Whitman)
I interact in multiple ways with my world. As environments and contexts change, so do I. I am one ‘me’ with my very elderly mother, another with friends. I’m different again with a client or with the young child of a friend. I’m different online than I am in person…. ‘
I rejected the idea that there’s a single ‘real’ self. Each of us is many different (though connected) ‘selfs’ in different contexts. ‘I’ am the qualities I experience across many different versions of ‘myself’.
The greater the commonality, the more integral to my ‘real self’ a particular quality seems.
If I’m generally calm, in most situations, I think of myself as a calm person.
If, in a specific context, in response to a specific person or situation, I lose my temper, I see it as ‘out of character’. It was ‘me’ who got angry, but I don’t think of that me as ‘the real me’.
If I start getting angry all the time in all sorts of different contexts and with lots of different people, I have to acknowledge that ‘the real me’ is often angry. I’m turning into an angry person.
This isn’t entirely true.
We’re not simply how we feel or react.
I might often be angry (or sad, stressed, anxious, compassionate), yet feel how I’m behaving doesn’t align with who I feel — or want — myself to be.
Alignment matters.
Authenticity and alignment are intertwined.
A key element of ‘feeling’ authentic is being aligned both with who I recognise as ‘me’ and with who I want that ‘me’ to be.
Our most authentic self emerges when our actions and our intentions are most perfectly aligned.
Amy Cuddy, in her book ‘Presence’ writes: ‘
By finding, believing, expressing, and then engaging our authentic best selves … we reduce our anxiety about social rejection and increase our openness to others .’
She’s more comfortable with the notion of an ‘authentic best’ self than I am, but I still think there’s a lot of value in what she writes.
The phrase ‘expressing then engaging’ is important. She suggests that first you express your ‘best self’, then, as a consequence, you find greater connection with the worlds inside and outside of you.
This is undoubtedly true. If you’re feeling authentic and inwardly aligned, it’s easier to engage fearlessly with your own insecurities and with the world around you.
The opposite is also true.
If you engage fearlessly with the world around you, and with your own thoughts, it can lead you to a sense of your aligned authenticity.
Bringing ones most authentic sense of self to what’s unfolding in one’s inner and outer world, requires presence.
The experience of authenticity creates, and is created by, commitment to being fearlessly present.
Though being ‘real’ might involve different behaviour and choices in different contexts, the experience of ‘authentic alignment’ is the same across all contexts.
It may be hard to define, but you can taste it when it’s there.
That’s as close as I can get to what authenticity actually means.
Let’s reject the notion of ‘authenticity’ as something we can be sold.
Something is not experienced as authentic unless we connect with it in the present moment and find it somehow aligns with our most aligned sense of self.
The metaverse may give some people an authentic experience. It won’t give an authentic experience to me, because its version of reality doesn’t align with my notion of reality — the reality I feel most fully alive when experienceing, nor the reality I believe to be important.
It will not be authentic to me, however sophisticated or persistent the advertising is.
I could of course be gullible — buy into a version of me that suits the marketers and so neglect the version of me I actually have grown to be.
That’s the intention isn’t — capitalism’s true alchemy. Constantly we’re being asked to change from the unique individuals we are into hoogenised tribes of purchasers, seeking an authenticity that’s never been ours.
When we’re presented with something as ‘authentic’, ask ‘authentic for whom?’ If it doesn’t align with me it isn’t for me. To know that — and avoid wasting time, money and attention on enhancing someone else’s profit margins – I need to become gently present with the most aligned version of myself I can connect with.
It matters. When marketing sells manufactured fakery as ‘the real thing’, we’re being asked to discard our reality.
My reality is mine.
It’s not for sale.
Authenticity is an inner experience that combines three strands:
1. How aligned I am with what feels true about myself.
2. How present I am with what I’m experiencing.
3. The intrinsic integrity of the actions I’m taking, experience I’m having, or goods I’m being offered.
Marketing, too often, asks us to be gullible.
We’re told something’s real and are expected to believe it.
We’re told someone’s sincere and we’re expected to buy their message or product.
Caveat Emptor — Buyer Beware!
We’re also encouraged to ‘be real’.
In fact, we’re asked to become real by buying someone else’s verions of reality.
Beware of that too!
The ‘real’ that marketing wants you to be, is the real that suits them — gullible, easily manipulated and with a credit card.
Marketing — like Facebook’s Metaverse — will, if you allow it, reduce you to a single dimension, a purchasing singularity, a credit card number entered mindlessly in a ‘buy now’ box.
Faced with claims that something is ‘authentic’, ask yourself if it aligns with who you most often are. Does it align with who you aspire to be? Does it resonate and connect with you in this moment, or only in some mythical fantasy world where everything is different (That neat software to help me keep my desktop tidy isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference to the chaos on my computer. If I think it will, I’m living in a fantasy universe……)
When I saw ‘authentic’ was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year, I felt a weariness. ‘There goes another vital human attribute into the cesspit of selling’, I thought.
Maybe it’s not so.
Perhaps we can use it as a wake-up call.
Something is not authentic because we’re told it is.
Nor is it necessarily authentic because, in the moment, we want it to be.
Authenticity is a deep texture of aligned ‘rightness’. It aligns the outer, the inner and how those things connect.
Mindful of the desire of marketers to fools us, and of our ability to fool ourselves, knowing of capitalism’s alchemic ability to turn gold to crap, we can fight to keep reality real.
We can live in authentic authenticity.
After thirty years performing, directing and teaching around the world, now I coach and mentor artists and others to live in joy and creativity. I also still perform sometimes, but usually keep my clothes on.
I recently published a free training ‘How to make BIG decisions when you feel really stuck’. It’s a PDF and video. Get your copy here.
More information about me here: www.johnbritton.co
Email: [email protected]