On the True Self, Artificiality, and Our Relationship with Life
Wednesday Wisdoms for May 8, 2024
Welcome back to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living by presenting three quotes, three observations, and three questions.
We paused this series over the month of April to trial sending these over Substack Notes but the consensus was to continue receiving them via email so these will continue now.
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On the True Self
🤨 Quote
“Today, we tend to live within an ethos of authenticity. We tend to believe that the "true self" is whatever is most natural and untutored. That is, each of us has a certain sincere way of being in the world, and we should live our life being truthful to that authentic inner self, not succumbing to the pressures outside ourself. To live artificially, with a gap between your inner nature and your outer conduct, is to be deceptive, cunning, and false.”
David Brooks
Source: The Road to Character
Observation 🧐
While an authentic self is being true to one’s nature, authenticity does not mean embracing one’s nature at the expense of living a good life.
That is to say, if your natural self is to be cruel to others, and you feel you must live your authentic existence and persist in the persecution or destruction of others, living an authentic existence will not lead to the ‘good life.’
We must find balance in life between our natural tendencies and our aspirational goals. If our goal is to live the good life, to find fulfillment through human flourishing, then we must examine our pitfalls and adjust.
“Truly humble people are engaged in a great effort to magnify what is best in themselves and defeat what is worst, to become strong in the weak places. They start with an acute awareness of the bugs in their own nature.”
Authenticity is the stripping away of our negatives, and elevating our positives. It is about bringing our best selves to the forefront of our existence, to build an authentically virtuous character.
“If you act well, eventually you will be good. Change your behavior and eventually you rewire your brain.”
🤔 Question
How do you keep an eye on your ‘true self’ while trying to improve in deficient areas? How do you determine what needs to be cut and what stays?
On Artificiality
🤨 Quote
“The natural can never be inferior to the artificial; art imitates nature, not the reverse.”
Marcus Aurelius
Source: Meditations 11.10
Observation 🧐
In The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion recounts a small moment she experienced after the passing of her mother. This moment would prepare her for the events she would be forced to face with the passing of her husband.
“After my mother died the undertaker who picked up her body left in its place on the bed an artificial rose… I would be armed against artificial roses.”
What Didion meant by this was that she would refuse to accept some artificiality to the process, she would instead embrace the hard realities of the situation.
She requested her husband not be tidied up and cleaned, she did not want the artificiality inserted into the natural process. By doing so, it would open her up to emotions and experiences that were opposite of reality.
“I had to believe he was dead all along,” she would later write. “If I did not believe he was dead all along I would have thought I should have been able to save him.”
There is no easing into grief, as we discussed several weeks ago, it has a mind of its own and determines when, where, and how it comes on.
But what Didion wanted to ensure about her grief was that there was nothing artificial about it. Her husband was a living, breathing being with talents, tendencies, and personality. Nothing would replace that, especially not a fake rose.
“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
🤔 Question
At what point do we come to reject the artificiality of life and embrace only the harsh truths it holds?
On Our Relationship with Life
🤨 Quote
“It's only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.”
Oliver Burkeman
Source: Four Thousand Weeks
Observation 🧐
Authenticity starts, first and foremost, with ourselves. It is built from our values and how those values carry through to our actions.