Authenticity.
I’m driving around town right now, running errands, listening to a podcast on a YouTube channel called Re-Tribalize. The guy has an interesting foundational concept, even if the execution might strike most people as a bit eccentric.
He’s talking about a wide variety of interesting ideas, but one of them jumped out at me. So I paused the podcast and dictated this latest mini essay — while still driving (carefully, of course).
The idea I want to talk about is authenticity.
One of the motivating factors behind this guy’s movement is the thought that young men (and women) have lost touch with their true selves. Their authentic selves. The thesis is that younger generations are hungry for authentic lives. Lives that move away from a purely virtual existence and back toward a physical one (dare I say, “analog”). That people are tired of being lost in a fake internet world and are longing for something solid, real, and grounded.
I couldn’t agree more.
In fact, it’s not just younger generations who yearn for authenticity. I think we all do. We’re sick of the spin, the propaganda, the branding, the signaling; everything society has trained us to do over the last few decades.
We’re tired of pretending to be what some marketing guru decided we should be. Tired of ad men telling us what to want, who to be, and how to live.
We’ve reached a point where we just want to make those decisions for ourselves again.
But to do that, we first have to know what’s real. What’s authentic. And that search has sparked dozens of movements in recent years — though movements like this are nothing new. As long as there has been society, there have been people searching for the authenticity that society, by necessity, tends to obscure. To live together in large groups, many basic instincts must be suppressed. The order of the collective becomes the priority.
So, whether it’s minimalism, homesteading, unplugging, digital detox, under-consumption, or any other movement pointing us back toward who we’ve always been as a species, they’re all chasing the same thing:
Authenticity.
A return to what is real.
I’m not sure I ever lost my authenticity, but I can certainly feel the siren call of the digital world. For me (a careful user of technology), it’s about making sure I don’t drift too far into something unreal — something inauthentic.
You know… leverage the good without being leveraged by the bad.
And, for those of you raised inside the virtual world, I applaud your recognition of its inauthenticity. And I applaud your desire to find a real life. An authentic life.
And from those of us who are old and have never really left…
Welcome to the real world.