Authenticity

It is of course right to be authentic about one’s feelings. If something good or bad happens, the authentic response is to feel the corresponding emotions. But if I am feeling good or bad because of something occurring one hour ago, yesterday, last month, last year, one hour hence, tomorrow, next month, next year, that’s authentic in one sense, but it’s an authentic response to an inauthentic experience, namely absenting myself from the reality of right now to indulge in fantasy.

In that sense, it’s dishonest. Since the feeling is also concomitant with what I am thinking about, and I am choosing what I am thinking about, it is also within my control, though I will usually deny that. Emotions stemming from the moment can be spontaneous. Emotions stemming from deliberately dwelling on the past or future are taken from the attic, the cellar, or the dress-up box. They’re real only in the way that theatrical costumes and greasepaint are real. They also typically lack subtlety. They come in a muddy deluge. A monochrome swamp. A glut of a single product. An engaged tone. An entirely grey sky. A diet of porridge or a box of toffee. Despair. Sadness. Anger. Fear. Depression. Not the ever-changing kaleidoscope of real emotion. Prime colours only, if there are any colours at all. Not feelings like the signals from a cat’s whiskers but states that actually block out real feeling. The shouting that blocks out the constant whispering of the soul.

There is also the question of theft. Everyone wants to live longer. But how much of the time have I spent absent from the present, thinking about events that have gone or are to come, and literally losing days, months, and years by living outside life? Stealing from my actual life to live in a fantasy netherworld.

And I call that authentic? It is no more authentic than playing a computer game in a darkened room on a sunny day, feeling the exhilaration and despair of the events I am constructing on the screen through my own imagination and manipulation.

Real emotion stems from live, real-time interaction with people and the universe, not from internal narratives running across the screen like subtitles to a soap opera rerun.

But even then: am I reacting to what is, or am I merely pressing play on old tapes, trotting out well-worn responses to standard scenarios, painting emotions by numbers, rehearsed, repeated, and redundant? Even in the moment, emotions might be authentic only to my interpretation of what is happening. But is the interpretation itself authentic? Interpretations rarely are. Fairy stories, for the most part.

I am supposed to feel, right, but specifically I am supposed to feel what is here and now, and without the buffer of interpretation. Only then is the feeling authentic. So, what is actually going on right now?