Julian Simpson’s Substack post, On Authenticity, has struck a chord with me this morning. I enjoy Simpson’s blogging/newsletters in which he describes his insights as a scriptwriter and I’m an avid fan of his audiodramas. Simpson frequently describes the challenges he faces in the meda industry in taking creative ideas forward into production through the layers of bureaucracy and creative interference.
In On Authenticity Simpson recounts his struggle with a screenplay which isn’t working for him and he begins to realise that the problem with it is that he has written against his instincts and that he has
attempted the square-peg-round-hole trick; in an attempt to take a weird idea and make it palatable, I have tried to package the weird idea as something un-weird
This causes Simpson to reflect on the nature of authenticity (as a writer).
Authenticity is telling your story the way you want to tell it, the way you would enjoy seeing it unfold. Anticipating what someone else might like is the opposite thing. But being authentic always feels courageous, and there are times for all of us where courage deserts us. Or at least times, like this one, where we realise we got scared somewhere along the way and have been unconsciously playing it safe, to the detriment of the story.
He goes on to reflect that:
It’s really easy to be authentic when it doesn’t matter; when there aren’t bills to pay, when it doesn’t matter if this thing ever gets made or published. It’s much harder when you feel external pressure and your instinct is to conform to a perceived expectation, to not rock the boat.
It seems to me that Simpson pretty much articulates something that is wider than just about a struggle to negotiate an authentic creativity as part of a media production process. It’s how anyone can maintain a sense of their own authenticity (your notion of self; “your story the way you want to tell it”) when faced with conforming to life (job, career, relationship, “when there are bills to pay”, whatever).
For me, this notion of authenticity – which simultaneously is one of individual agency – is at the heart of how to live meaningfully. The “instinct to conform” seems to me to be totalising and oppressive in a way that we’ve not seen for nearly a century. (Though I’m willing to accept that gathering inauthenticity happens with age.) Is there a sliding scale of authenticity that meets happy compromise somewhere along the line? Zero hours contracts – the anathema of authenticity for who could ever live an authentic life tied to truly breadline-insecure employment? – would occupy one end of that scale. Or even more, the penury of long-term unemployment. But what would the other end – sincere authenticity – be? I’m not conviced that the right way of thinking about it or that describing it as “courageous” is neccessarily the right thing to do.
There’s also an element of thinking that true authenticity can only be a side-line hustle or attained by the wealthy. That most of us who have to scrape out a living in an inauthentic, capitalist economy are forced to be perpetually fragmentary inauthentic beings at the whims of our bosses and corporate overlords. (Maybe there’s truth in this, though, and that this contributes to the pandemic of mental health crises ravaging western capitalism.) That we can only attain brief moments of being authentic and not rock the boat too much in our lives. We can only be our authentic selves as children and that, in growing up, we allow ourselves to be synthetic, phony. (Cue thoughts about PKD regarding most people as androids.)
Inauthentic android? Or is authenticity just a matter of Do what thou wilt?