Have you noticed how ‘authenticity’ has become something of a buzzword lately?
Having become unlaced from its close old companion ‘integrity’, its meaning has taken on a new set of connotations. As Douglas Wilson says in his short book Wordsmithy, ‘the word authentic has lost its authenticity and has become a nebulous term of praise’.
A longing for greater personal legitimacy is being played out on social media and in our shops, cafés and advertising culture, all of which either offer a way of expressing our authenticity or promise to deliver more of it. Our consumer age is only too happy to sell us everything we need in order to be ‘authentic’. We can, apparently, purchase our way to true individuality.
Contrived depictions
One of the driving forces in propagating this new authenticity is Instagram, a place where authenticity has become aesthetically homogenous. According to lots of photographs that bear #authentic in their captions, an authentic life looks like good coffee, art and muted colours, crisp white sheets in the same setting as a cactus, cocktails in mason jars and remote cabins in forests.
A deep irony lies in how contrived these depictions of ‘authenticity’ are. Even if the image hasn’t been photoshopped, it’s been carefully composed, run through filters and adjusted in order to look like a more beautiful version of reality. They’re beautiful to behold and the platform enables everyone to create art with photography, but if we’re convincing ourselves that this is reality, we’ll become frustrated and resentful of the mundanity of our day-to-day calling and surroundings.
Downing a social media empire
Essena O’Neill, an 18-year-old Australian woman, had built herself a social media empire. Capturing moments of her seemingly flawless life, she gained half a million followers on Instagram, as well as nearly the same number again on her YouTube channel. She recently brought her own empire down by deleting over 2000 images and renaming her account ‘Social Media Is Not Real Life’. She reworded many of the captions on the remaining photos, revealing that she didn’t eat on the day she presented the world with the perfect bikini shot and stating the amounts of money different brands had paid her to post photographs wearing their clothes.
In a video she posted explaining her decision, she said ‘social media is contrived images and edited clips ranked against each other. It’s a system based on social approval, likes, validation in views, success in followers. It’s perfectly orchestrated self-absorbed judgment.’ O’Neill’s account is just one of thousands of its kind, publicising to the world a perfectly unsustainable life.
Enter the scene, Socality Barbie. Simply satirising aesthetically predictable ‘authentic’ living, the account now has over 1 million followers smirking at a Barbie figurine placed in compositions that have now become boringly common to Instagram feeds. By means of a selfie with the figurine, Darby Cisneros, Socality Barbie’s creator, announced that the account was closing because ‘SB’s work here is done: it has opened the door to discussions about how we choose to present ourselves online, the insane lengths many of us go to to create the perfect Instagram life, and calling into question our authenticity and motives.’
Flawless and serene
Both O’Neill and Cisneros have seen and exposed the hypocrisy of the cultivated authenticity that’s currently flourishing all over our society. There’s a danger that, unex-amined, Christians too will be drinking in the idea that an authentic life should look flawless and serene. This is not what the life of Jesus depicts. We long for a perfect world, a creation unblemished, lives full of uncomplicated relationships.
We long for these things because we are made for these things, and God has promised they will be ours to enjoy in the new heaven and the new earth. But let’s not pretend we’re there already – that’s a perfection that only God in his new creation can deliver. We’re living in the tension of the days in between, and we can live out shafts of the beauty that is to come, by the grace of God transforming us into what we’ll one day fully be. Let’s live full lives that are not afraid to enter into the rubble of complex relationships, that care obediently for a creation that groans for renewal, that serve and love sacri-ficially with bodies which long to be remade. Let’s get rough hands from doing each other’s washing up. Let’s be too busy listening to each other to take photos of our coffee. If we do so, our lives will be telling a better story; one of real authenticity.
