Week 99.
My toaster is temperamental.
Or so it seems. Its caprices have become unmanageable of late. It whimsically decides what electrical outlet it prefers each morning and refuses to operate in any other. It insists that Elder Advice relax and unkink its cord. Daily. And it unilaterally and inconsistently determines what “toasted” means.
I have also found it responds poorly to threats.
Largely because it is 2022, I think my toaster may be in search of its “authentic self”. Which is concerning if the result is a belief that it was never intended to toast bread. Equally alarming is the potential for the malaise to spread to Elder Advice’s other appliances and inevitably, the oven discovering its “authentic self” is not self cleaning. In the meantime, my doctor is understandably worried that I am lack toast intolerant.
Sources claiming to be authoritative trumpet that your “authentic self” is who you truly are, regardless of such things as your occupation and the influence of others, and free of the alleged tyranny of their views of you. A supposedly “honest” representation of yourself.
Now if being my “authentic self” really means not caring what others think of me, assuming that includes what I think of “authentic selves”, Elder Advice is entirely on board.
But alas, it does not.
Whenever Elder Advice had to listen to someone in the 1970s blather on about how they needed to go off to “find” themselves, he always secretly hoped they would. Immediately. And never return. While that nonsense subsided by the largely horrible 1980s, awful ideas always seem to return with a vengeance - like bellbottoms and collaterized debt obligations. Now the journey to “find” yourself is apparently one that can be undertaken without the requirement of movement. Right here. In front of the rest of us.
Shoot me now.
Talk of “authentic selves” arises because Elder Advice was recently required to fill out a survey. This one specifically inquired: “Do you feel you can bring your authentic self to work?” Needless to say, among many other things, my self - “authentic” or not - loathes surveys.
Otherwise, Elder Advice knows this “authentic self” business is part and parcel of the despicable modern cult of self obsession – that everything, always, is all about “you”. Because, apparently, the “real you” can be detached from your family and friends and everyone else who influences you, and has nothing to do with what you do for a living or otherwise. Because, apparently, you can untangle yourself from all the intricate and largely laudable connections you have made with people, places and things - the connections that, Elder Advice quietly suggests, make you … you. And because, apparently, you should want to.
Perhaps, Elder Advice speculates, if people did not spend so much time arduously constructing on line mythologies - chronically happy, successful, imaginary avatars of themselves on their social media accounts - there would be no perceived need to deconstruct them in public.
Anyway, one thing is certain: assuming you can strip yourself down to your self-important essence, no one other than psychiatrists will want to talk to you. And they will insist on being paid to do it.
As for littering workplaces with “authentic selves”, that will only trigger a pandemic of ergasiophobia - the debilitating fear of going to work - among the rest of us. Unless your “authentic self” is self-employed, Elder Advice implores, please bring only your work self - your selfless self - to work. If the “real you” is not focused on providing the services for which you are paid, ask that self-serving self to remain at home between 9 and 5, or whatever your work hours are. And if that self is too immature to be left alone, please put a snug, opaque lid on it until you are both in some place other than the workplace. Some place in which, you are both certain, I am not.
This will avoid the predictable consequences that even advocates of self indulgence are belatedly acknowledging. Like “floodlighting”: the act of oversharing personal details with others in the workplace. Who, those advocates say, “aren’t ready for it”, but who, Elder Advice suggests: “do not want to, and should not have to, deal with it, especially when they are supposed to be working”. And “voluntelling”: when minority group members are cajoled into openly sharing and feel obligated to relive past traumas for those who think they are helping the disadvantaged be “seen.” These and other outcomes of “authenticity” have led one “authentic self”-promoter to finally caution: “Rather than using the workplace as a forum for self-expression, perhaps a more helpful strategy is shifting that energy to helping employees end the workday on time. This empowers employees to feel energized in accomplishing their common work goals and frees up time to be themselves outside the workplace.”
Right. Perhaps with their friends and family rather than their co-workers. The way people have conducted themselves for some time. The last several thousand years, anyway.
Elder Advice? It’s just a thought, but should not our aim be to reduce the number of people who agonize on their death beds: Who is the world going to revolve around now?
… Does anyone else smell burnt toast?