I’ve been thinking recently about authenticity, in the sense of being authentic to oneself. I’ve always heard authenticity talked about as if it meant “a lack of influence from others”, but this never made sense to me. It implies there’s some way of fully separating which of your ideas are your own and which are made from other people’s. But how? Even the very first things you learn to do in life as a baby are learned by copying people around you. We’re too interconnected to be able to avoid being affected by each other.

As I result I spent a lot of my life not really thinking about authenticity, but recently, reading about the branch of philosophy called phenomenology, I realised it doesn’t actually matter if authenticity is “real”. The phenomenologists advocated for studying the direct experience of things, ignoring external facts of what they are or whether they’re even real at all. I realised I could still explore what authenticity felt like without having to figure out what it was.

Doing this, I think I managed to find a much stronger sense of it than I have before. It’s a weird feeling which I would describe as “feeling oneself as a separate presence.” It’s a feeling of being made of two parts—there’s a “you” which is conscious and experiencing the world, but there is also a “you” which inhabits the same body, which drives your opinions and cravings and all the unexplainable, arbitrary preferences that you have. Being authentic to yourself means being aware of this other part and what it wants.

It means, essentially, experiencing things twice: first viscerally, and secondly as a kind of spectator or caretaker. You enjoy things and then also enjoy the fact that you’re enjoying them. It’s like having joint attention on your own experience.

I don’t know much Freud but the two-part thing seems similar to his idea of the ego and id, where the id is “the unconscious source of all innate needs, emotional impulses and desires”, and the ego contains the sense of self. I found out recently that ego and id aren’t particularly special terms; they’re simply Latin for “I” and “it”. To be authentic requires accepting that there is an “it” within you which you can’t control.

I also realised that they key to locating the sense of authenticity is through the feeling of aloneness. You have to accept that this communication between ego and id, or you and your senses, is completely private—it cannot truly be communicated to someone else, nor can it really be understood. It can only be felt or experienced by you, and experiencing it requires turning inwards, away from other people. Your own experience is the whole point.

Another reason aloneness is important is because aloneness, or privacy, is the only way you can ensure what you’re feeling is honest:

I now think privacy is important for maximizing self-awareness and self-transparency. The primary function of privacy is not to hide things society finds unacceptable, but to create an environment in which your own mind feels safe to tell you things. If you’re not allowing these unshareworthy thoughts and feelings a space to come out, they still affect your feelings and behavior– you just don’t know how or why.
– On privacy - Holly Elmore

Deliberately focusing on aloneness and “the it” like this has a big effect on my whole sense of perception, where it feels like my sense of awareness returns back inside my body; I stop trying to picture myself from outside-in and imagining how other people see me, and instead fully “see out” from inside my own body—I feel viscerally that my senses are a boundary between the inside and outside world, instead of it all being a unclear mix of the two.