It feels like not that many years ago there was an interest, almost a “movement” if you will, to seek out and embrace our “authenticity”, to “get real” with ourselves and our world, and cut through all the game-playing to get back to the essentials of human living.
Am I wrong? Was that just in my head – or maybe just not in the South?
In any case, we seem to be living now in a post-truth, post-authenticity world, where it’s easier to adopt a persona (especially online) rather than be who you really are. Maybe it’s thanks to the Trump years (which ain’t over, are they?).
Maybe it’s “reality” TV. Maybe it’s because when we isolated during Covid a lot of us realized we really didn’t like ourselves all that much. Maybe it’s because of our fascination with Artificial Intelligence (AI) created not from just facts, but from our illusions, misinformation, misperceptions, and flat out lies.
Have we ourselves become deep fakes of human beings? We made corporations people. We make bots our friends. We add filters to our photos to make us younger, better looking, and cooler than we ever actually were. We imagine a world where we don’t actually have to accept responsibility or be accountable.
As Jello Biafra once quipped, the conveniences we demanded are now mandatory.
But life hasn’t gotten any easier, has it? Real life, that is. Every day here and now.
Well maybe it’s not SUPPOSED to be easy. No muscle grows without resistance.
Trees that don’t experience the wind never put down deep roots.
11 OCT 2024
© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
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