Why "authentic" people feel so fake

Sir, this is a Starbucks

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and apparently, so is the road to hellish conversations. I have observed a culture spreading around the world via the Transatlantic Hippy Corridor, a culture of “authentic relating”:

If you’ve never had the privilege of someone “relating authentically to you”, it feels not only claustrophobic in the way the tone shifts to a tone utmost Seriousness™ but also surreal in its performance of earnestness.

The desire for Real Talk makes sense. So much conversation is superficial and designed to ignore the elephant in the room. Families will talk at each other passive aggressively until someone literally dies of old age. Couples will sit in silence with feelings choked in throats. It’s easy to feel gaslit when everyone pretends everything is fine. It makes sense to reach for the hammer to break the glass.

However, the hammer of Authentic Relating is clumsy at best and alienating at worst. The first rule of persuasion is to meet people where they are. Meeting your Asian parents with Therapy Speak is like arriving to a mosque in drag.

It’s important to code switch for your sake and for the sake of others around you. It’s not being “fake”, it’s being relatable and therefore potentially charismatic enough to induce change. Speaking Therapy Speak unironically like: “I hear you, I see you” makes sense and is understood in certain places but in most parts of the world you’re going to be seen as a weirdo and the audience’s initial gut rejection distances anything you actually want to communicate.

Humour is a test of trust. If you can get someone to laugh with you, it means you have found a space of common agreement. It’s important to be light even about heavy topics. The problem, I think, with Therapy and Therapy Talk is that it has to be Correct and Serious. Life is nonsensical and irreverent; you have to be too. The messes we get ourselves into are stupid and we are stupid for it. Everyone already feels bad to some degree, why not make light of it while being real.

Finally, there’s an insidiousness lurking in people who front authenticity. Like why would you do that? It’s funny because the ulterior motive is never far away - all questions are always leading and the performed smile is clearly borrowed from elsewhere. It fails the smell test each time.

Real people are just chill - it’s easy to tell.