We are unconsciously becoming someone else
souravinsights.comIf you accept Rene Girard's mimetic theory, then _all_ human desire is fundamentally mimetic. We all learn to want what others want. If this is true, then is there any authentic you at all?
Sidenote: An interesting less spoken about part is Rene's idea of the scapegoat. Any good mimetic desire needs a scapegoat for when competition and rivalry ultimately occur as a byproduct of many people wanting the same thing. Is the LLM the scapegoat in this new equation? This article certainly blames it.
Authenticity as a notion is a robust Western cultural more that I find confusing. The best parse I can get on it is this: developing an awareness and possibly a narrative around ways you behave with a subconscious expectation of social affirmation. Developing that awareness can certainly feel like a liberation of self-determination.
That can, also, undoubtedly be a powerful tool in overcoming cultural brainwashing of sorts, but I think the knife cuts both ways. The "authentic self" term makes it sound ontologically real and suggests that there is merit in searching for "finding oneself" when no ther motivating need exists. That road leads to pathological definition writing, IMHO.
I don't think authenticity is necessarily a Western value.. In India or Hindusim we have a term called "Swadharma" - basically means an individual's unique personality or moral obligations that aligns with their inner nature/self. The old notion here is "better to follow your own path than someone else's".
But when I say "be authentic" I don't necessarily mean about finding a hidden real you. It's a very difficult quest anyway but I think we can start with spotting where we're performing for an audience.
Anyway, I started this post with a very simple surface level observation but now it's getting a little deep haha
It’s not possible to define a river. Try, and you end up with the definition of an aqueduct.
I think the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry on rivers manages it nicely, with no confusion with aqueducts: "A river is a natural stream of fresh water that flows on land or inside caves towards another body of water at a lower elevation, such as an ocean, lake, or another river."
That defines the concept of a river, not an actual river.
Sure, learning changes you. Some of that learning is deliberate and some is unconscious, and you are what you learn. I don't think it means you should be afraid to learn new things, but you might want to pay attention to what you spend your time learning.
Aagree. I mean we can't avoid being influenced or be afraid of learning new things. That's impossible anyway.
I think what I'm getting at is being a little more conscious of what we're consuming and how much of our preferences/behaviour we're adopting unconsciously.
And why do we need this drama of authenticity at all? It always baffles me how humans keep creating problems just like that.
Before looking for a solution, just stop for a second and evaluate whether we need more problems. If so, ask yourself for whom we are creating more problems?
The drama of authenticity is only a veil over the problem of trusting other people. If you cannot trust other people, why even post a comment, or for that matter contribute to society?
If you can trust people, then knowing when and how to trust them matters, and thus authenticity is a concern.
You have actually observed something interesting here because authenticity is how we decide who to trust. Effort and voice used to be cheap signals of a real person now llms can fake pretty much both, so I'm having to work harder to know who is on the other end.
So it's about connection, and how authenticity affects it.
The author's gripe is about losing one's self to the influence of society.
Being driven, rather than doing your own driving. Following instead of leading.
And then once you're in this rut, it becomes difficult to connect with you. Trust is an issue because the reader doesn't know who is writing anymore. Hence his disclaimer at the start.
I don't know what to say though. Careful, authentic writing takes time that everyone seems to be running out of.
Because authenticity matters today even more so. A simple observation, imagine this post was purely generated/optimized by llm, it wouldn't have gotten people discussing about it. Cause it's easy for smart people to quickly notice the slop and the tone. You definitely have noticed that llms don't seem to have strong opinions, it always tries to be politically correct and that's easy to spot. But having strong opinions itself isn't necessarily a sign of authenticity though. As "itsalwaysgood" put it, authenticity forces people to think through what they want to communicate so it works as a friction for good writing and drives genuine engagement. I mean who would love the idea of talking/arguing with a bot.
When I'm talking to a person irl or even chatting online I would find it very weird if the the person is always conforming to me and rarely brings up a new genuine insight or a contrary thought to add to the discussion. I'm not looking for a debate always though, sometimes just listening to someone is enough.
> We are not just loosing our voice or identity we are also loosing our thinking capability.
They bolded that section. I’m not saying we need to give over all thinking to AI, but it is helpful for spotting typos.
Two typos in a row indicate it’s not a typo… the author just doesn’t know the correct spelling.
I figured the typos are intentional to indicate "not written by AI", because how the hell do you end up with "bdw"?
No, I think I don't need to do such cheap stunts to back the authenticity of this post.
I guess it's much of a bad habbit/influence of using auto-suggestions in my mobile keyboard than a typo I agree..
The answer is to think back to the kid you used to be, but now the kids are formed differently than before. The new kids have computers and YouTube, they already are participating in the misma of technology, they don't have the old memories of the before computer times to fall back into.
> Authenticity now has to be certified
so did someone come up with a solid authenticity benchmark for humans yet?
I think Abraham Lincoln
Nah, George Washington. He was so authentic that he never told a lie.
What makes an action ‘authentic’? The parts of you that “mask”, “cheat”, or “lie” are also “authentic you”. This new age talk of Authenticity carries within a narcissistic danger of rejecting some parts of yourself (strategies of survival) and trying to get rid of them instead of transforming, growth, expansion. To believe we can ever act without consideration of our environment, and we just ‘need to become more authentic’, is similarly wrong and will lead to “suffering”.
Secondly, and even more dangerous, is to assume you had an identity in the first place. What the author probably mistakes for his identity is an image molded into him by parents, early circumstances, and societal norms and rules at the time. A “violation” of these internalized rules later in life can feel life-threatening, or wrong, and invoke shame, because in early age, belonging was strictly necessary for survival. Later in life, that limits your options, but has nothing to do with “who you are”. You create who you are, moment to moment.
Consider an inquiry when you think “that was not authentic” (by yourself or other). What kind of internalized rules does it touch? Do you actually still consider these rules to be correct and useful today?
The past can and will haunt you, but it’s not real. It’s ghosts. You need to decide how to deal with them. But “lack of authenticity” is not it.
You are the ongoing creator of your identity. And you still want to belong. But maybe not to the church of your upbringing. You’re free to burn it down any time.
> the boundary between "I like this" and "I've seen enough people liking this that I now think I like this" gets blurry
Burning Man has a lot of things I’ve never seen before that I wind up liking without anyone else’s validation
Most of that experience is still different than what gets posted online about that experience
If you’re looking for what this article is talking about, it’s there
Yeah I agree that direct experience is definitely a pretty good counterweight. You can definitely discover something completely on your own and genuinely like it, without ever seeing anyone else validate it.
But yeah I wasn't stressing much on this specific idea/notion in my post though.
Author unconsciously became someone who misspells "losing" as "loosing". It proves it's not slop though, so I'm grateful.
Sorry for the snark. I like the idea of the article. I'm becoming an asshole day-by-day, I don't like it, I wonder if it's because of the deluge of idiocy that we're confronted with, that grows and grows, also thanks to comment sections (spot the irony). The sad thing about the Internet is it's a high speed tool to bring idiocy in front of you.
But even without the Internet, isn't culture a way of creating society of similar people, ie. people influenced by others? Taylor Swift is gigantic pop star, but so were the Beatles. Different regions had different local recipes, that all the moms knew how to make, spread in a memetic way...
As I tell my kids. I was young too. But I'm not young now.
- unpopular opinion: wipe out every comment and every post made on X, instagram and tiktok from every hard drive on the planet and you ll be absolutely blown away by how much the society ll change within a week
this is such a spicy thought worth overthinking lol
people who are stuck spending a lot of time inside apartments doom scrolling are definitely going to become detached from reality, but anyone who is engaging in social and outdoor, and physical activities is going to have perspective, even having a cat or a dog around is going to provide a significant counter to any of the wackological naritives populating the slop-a-verse
I don't think the victims here are simply people inside appartments doom-scrolling. Also, having real experiences, going outdoors, talking to people doesn't necessarily make someone immune from being shaped or influenced unconciously. It's even tough if the influence happens irl cause you don't necessarily recognise it as influence since it comes from the close people you trust. But I don't know maybe I can sort of agree it gives you a healthier mix of both.