I want to talk a bit about authenticity. One interesting thing about authentic people is that you can identify them quickly. Authentic people have an energy that makes others want to be around them—they’re like magnets. Well, without saying it . . . sometimes without even knowing it . . . we are all striving to become our most authentic selves. And, in fact, the process of becoming our truest selves has been studied for decades. Erik Erikson was a developmental psychologist from the 1960’s who put quite a lot of effort into understanding how we can maintain our personal integrity . . . how we stay true to ourselves . . . in the face of so many outside factors that want to pull at us . . . that want us to be something different . . . that challenge us to remain true to our beliefs, our values; that want to distract us from our life goals. I often imagine our truest self to be a perfectly round ball made up of loose parts connected on the inside with rubber bands . . . so the parts can temporarily pull away from the core then fall back into place when whatever was pulling at it goes away . . . and the goal is to never let a part of that core self get pulled too far for too long by some outside force . . . to not let that sphere stay out of shape for any longer than we want it to be. And when we have full and total control of the shape of that sphere, we have reached the holy grail of authenticity . . . we have become our truest self.
You all know what this feels like . . . we usually experience our truest selves in kind of fleeting glimpses somewhere in adolescence—most of us didn’t stay there for very long. Even as adults most of our spheres look like one of those plastic spherical puzzles that you take apart and have to put back together again . . . except for some it never really gets put back together perfectly. Because it’s hard to be our truest selves. And I would argue that it’s harder today than it ever was!
One of my favorite shows growing up was Little House on the Prairie. I liked it for the same reason that kids love tree forts and big cardboard boxes: for the solace of being within a confined, controllable, and manageable space—a space where nothing is pulling at us—where we can be our truest selves. The folks in that little house on the prairie were kind of isolated. Their families and close friends were their primary supports. They tended to hold a single job for a lifetime usually and their parents and grandparents usually did the same work. They met a fewer number of people each day, and those that they did meet likely held similar beliefs and values. It was safe; it was manageable—it was one socially confined cardboard box.
But society today isn’t like that; we are progressing. We’re expanding. We now have text messaging, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and email. We travel huge distances physically and virtually. We change jobs. We change partners. We relocate more frequently. We meet sometimes hundreds of people each day, each with different perspectives, values, and opinions. While exposure to that kind of diversity offers vibrancy and healthy challenges to stuck ways of thinking and being, we need to remember that rapid and continual challenges to our values and beliefs can contribute to confusion and unpredictability and uncertainty—it can be sort of an assault on our psychological moorings—it can cause that sphere of self to remain chronically out of shape. And when we feel constantly pulled apart from who and what we truly want to be, we feel it. And it’s not a good feeling.
It seems no coincidence that rates of anxiety—feelings of uncertainty and unpredictability—have increased quite a lot in the past ten years. Ironically, in this age of social opportunity our kids leave the house less frequently. In the past ten years, rates of volunteerism amongst adolescents has decreased (and rates have increased amongst older adults—who are those less likely to use social media). We’ve gone from kick-the-can, whiffle ball, and family mealtimes, to iPhones, Facebook Live, and Blog Posts. We download books, instead of going to the library—one of our community’s social hubs!
What we’re doing is seeking solitude in reaction to the social complexities of our societies. We’re seeking isolation because we think that our true selves are being torn apart . . . that our core self is being threatened . . . we think that if we accept diversity, we are abandoning our deepest, truest, most authentic selves. But diversity is a threat only when we don’t respect our own values and beliefs—only when we ALLOW our spherical self to be distorted.
While the function of isolation may be to offer us the space to figure out who we are and who we want to be, our mistake is that we will never figure that out alone. We are who we are because of diversity. And our job is to remain our spherical selves even when confronted with difference . . . to allow different beliefs and different values to exist around us without this extreme emotional reactivity that we have seen so much in the past many months.
Diversity is a threat only when we don’t respect our own values and beliefs—and here’s a thought . . . is it possible that when we become fragmented when confronted with diversity that the wisdom of our truest self is trying to tell us to let that argumentative part of us absorb that difference to become an even truer, more authentic self?
We need to embrace the opportunity to learn about different cultures, values, and faiths offered to us by social expansion. And we also need to be aware of our tendency to retreat from diversity into the safety of our adult-sized cardboard boxes.
Well, my guest today doesn’t retreat. Viv is the host of a podcast called How to Live with Viv, in which she talks with friends and guests about how to navigate through their 20’s. She recognizes that the 20’s are a time for exploration into ourselves—a time when we are expanding our social reach . . . when we launch into the world more independently than we ever had and become exposed to diversity in ways that we never were. The 20’s are a time that can make or break our effort to solidify our selves . . . when we can make the decision to allow ourselves to be changed by diversity in healthy ways without losing a sense of authenticity . . . without losing our sense of self.
I said early that you can identify authentic people quickly. Viv has that authentic energy that made me want to stay engaged . . . to keep talking . . . to keep asking questions. I suspect you’ll feel the way.
To listen to How to Live with Viv, visit http://howtolivwithviv.buzzsprout.com/
