Authenticity: How to loose yourself?

This post is inspired by What's authentic at metacool. I'll take a stab at finding principles for authenticity. What is authenticity?

A person, product or place may seem pretentious, displaced, or lost. When something lacks authenticity then there must be reasons. But when something seems authentic then people must lack reasons to argue it away.

If authenticity were color, i would be percieve it as white, stainless. It would hide the visible colors and contain them at the same time. You can recognize authenticity best by the abscence of any coloration, by the abscence of any reasons that could induce a feeling that something is not pure about a person, object or place.

Therefore there are no fundamental rules to achieve authenticity. There are as many recipies to enjoy it as there are people on earth. Each of us has a voice of self, a unique voice. We reflect on each other and overlap each other. People are not composed of a hard center that represents the true, authentic self. We are composing ourselves by aquiring qualities out of a common pool. The compositions are different, the ingredients are the same. Authenticity is vainful, full of vain, or void of all, whichever you like.

Any attempt to construe authenticity may bring you closer to yourself. It is good to have benchmarks. But there are not any fundamental principles that could apply across all contexts.

Authenticity is noticable through lack of noise, not through addition of qualities that can amount to it. If you want an authentic salad, don't mix tomatoes and olive oil into it. Enjoy the green leaves only and you will have an authentic experience. Well no, it is not that easy. There is italian salad, american salad etc.. Each salad style has its own character and can be distinguished. Distinctiveness thus helps authenticity. But it is never a requisite.

There are certainly ways to make people, products or places more authentic. This can happen not by adding stuff, but by avoiding stuff that causes other people to percieve flaws. Her is an example. WebNews.de is a copy of digg.com. It works well and the localisation of digg.com to aggregate german news makes sense of course. However, they just forgot  to give digg.com some credit. That makes the project less authentic (a less authentic copy) to me because the builders do not behave as they expect their participants to behave. Digg cool stuff!! Give credit!! Promote people and stories. Damn fools!

We are born authentic. The rest of life is about recovering it. As we grow older we loose authenticity in two ways. We find answers to who we are and we find restraints to who we could be. The first process lets you be yourself without finding it difficult to explain why. State of equilibrium. The second process lets you grow and expend yourself. State of trouble.

If you are a fisherman and dream about being a dancer, then does that make you less authentic? No. You can accomplish any task you set your mind to and dream about other things all the while. People may hear sadness in the voice of the fisherman. That gives hope. Because something inside of him is still talking, even though his occuputation does not match up to his dream. That's authentic. You can be authentic while your hands, your heart and your mind each pursue their own agenda.

Authenticity is what other people feel in reaction to something. The feeling informs you to move you closer. Yet attraction is not a requisite to engender  authenticity.

Can you be authentic while you are self-conscious? Yes. An actor who knows his lines can concentrate on how to act himself into being someone. The same applies in real life. You talk yourself into action and act yourself into believing.

Are plants authentic? The unimpeded path of a tree rising into the sky does not leave traces of dishonest growth. Can a tree be percieved as pretentious by its peers? Plants are. Humans make believe.

As a man, you can convert yourself into a woman. Does that make you less authentic. Yes, clearly not. Pun intended.

To demand to be authentic is to demand not to seem pretentious.  It appears that even this simple rule of thumb can not help you to build more authentic places. Paris in Las Vegas is part of what makes Las Vegas the Las Vegas. The focus here is not on Paris, but on Las Vegas. They built a copy of Paris into Las Vegas not to make you feel in Paris, but to make you feel in Las Vegas. So, the fake experience of Parisian flair is authentically lasvegian.

To get along, we need to copy from each other to cope with each other. This starts very early. A child that does not copy from its parents will die. A business that does not adapt to better ways of business might die, but it does not make itself more authentic by refusing to adapt. Copying does not preclude authenticity. It helps it! Whatever you do already exists, and has already happend. Blissfull ignorance of other people's achievements does spur your own creative authentic act, but copying is unavoidable. Remember we are made of DNA. So you would have to be a vampire, suck my blood and cause me to  implode to understand my utterly authentic makeup.