My Life as a Fake

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Unsystematic investigations suggest that a great many people feel like fakes in the jobs, or their lives, on the verge of discovery. What is to explain this strange trend?
 

vimothy

yurp
As I understand it (extremely ropey undergrad reading many moons ago alert), if man is truly free, he is also free to deny himself freedom and choose to live as a mere thing in the world, a victim of circumstance, in fact as someone who is not free.

There's the famous bit with the waiter. It must be online somewhere...
 

vimothy

yurp
Not as easy to find the actual text as I would have thought.

[+]Let us consider the waiter in the café...His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly, his nose, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, tyring to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying the tray with the stiffness of a tight rope walker ...

... all his behaviour seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not wait long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café ...​
 

swears

preppy-kei
What's your "real self" though? There's always some element of self-consciousness in everything you do.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
So, Joe (for instance) is only playing at being a plumber. He has not embraced plumbing to the depths of an existential choice, so his deep feelings of fakery are really accurate feelings of the true situation?

In a world of precarity, I can see the economic context for this kind of attitude. On the other hand, I find it very hard to believe in the idea of a truly committed plumber, who is nothing but a plumber, as everyone is always playing multiple roles.

It seems to me that there are issues of status here, in particular. Isn't the idea of being a fake ultimately to do with how others see you? Or, how you think that they see you.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Hmm is the feeling of being a "fake" at all related to a sense you have that you don't deserve your own "station in life"? Do you feel that your work and social obligations don't match up with who you really are or want to be?

Because if this is the case, I think many many people feel this way, especially in industrialized cultures and Fordist and post-Fordist capitalist cultural milieus.

Not trying to beat the dead horse, but Marx talked a lot about people being alienated from their "species essence" under capitalism. From wikipedia:

Marx attributes four types of alienation in labour under capitalism.[1] These include the alienation of the worker from his or her ‘species essence’ as a human being rather than a machine; between workers, since capitalism reduces labour to a commodity to be traded on the market, rather than a social relationship; of the worker from the product, since this is appropriated by the capitalist class, and so escapes the worker's control; and from the act of production itself, such that work comes to be a meaningless activity, offering little or no intrinsic satisfactions.
 

Pestario

tell your friends
So, Joe (for instance) is only playing at being a plumber. He has not embraced plumbing to the depths of an existential choice, so his deep feelings of fakery are really accurate feelings of the true situation?

What is a "real" plumber? If Joe fixes pipes and drains and does all the other things expected of a plumber then he is a plumber. If Joe does not feel as if he is a "real plumber" then there must be some discordance between what he does and his idea of what he should be doing. It might be because he has lofty ideas of what a plumber should be. Or perhaps he his deeply, disatisfied with his life but lacks the imagination or vision to consider not being a plumber and as a result projects his disatisfaction and insecurity onto his current role. I am plumber, I don't feel happy with it, I must be a bad plumber.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Work - it obviously depends on what sort of job you have. If you're on a production line sticking widgets on something then it's simply a question of whether or not you can do it accurately and in sufficient quantity to the satisfaction of your boss.

But most people have an element of the subjective in their work, which can give room for doubt. And bear in mind it is usually to people's financial advantage to work in a job which stretches them slightly.

I think there are always questions about whether one is working hard enough, or could have done something better. Which can give rise to doubt doubt doubt.

It's a good reason to have close friends at work - people who will be honest about the fact that, at one level, everyone is winging it.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
topic and avatar combo gets a perfect 10.

i think role-playing is such integral part of "modern" society that it's become second nature, but often i guess we still can't escape the feeling of pretending to be something we are not
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Work - it obviously depends on what sort of job you have...

I think that it might be a mistake to identify imposture syndrome too closely to jobs, since people can experience it in other walks of life as well - like sexual relationships, for example. "Does she know who I really am?" Or even, "Am I a real man?"

There is a clear "queer sexuality" dimension to this problem: I refer here to the notorious closet. Someone in the closet has a secret - they harbour errant desires - and nobody really knows this, therefore they are fakes. Then they come out of the closet by admitting and naming these. But what if there is no closet to come out of, or no community to join on emergence? This is what interests me, I guess.
 

slim jenkins

El Hombre Invisible
In relation to work - many times in the past I've encountered the phenomenon of people becoming 'more themselves' when in the pub at lunchtime - more open, honest etc.

The work environment typically warps character, mood, behaviour patterns in response to its falsity, being a place where most would not choose to be (accepting that I'm talking about menial work, rather than career choices such as science or surgery). It did not render them robotic or morose, but in a state of passivity and reluctant fatalism rather than active engagement.

Anarchists might argue that work is the curse upon all mankind. The question arises: what would they do without this kind of work? Would they be able to 'find themselves' and begin a life of creativity and exploration - or simply languish on the sofa, dying slowly to the soundtrack of daytime TV?

Who is 'real' on this forum? To the extent that all present only sides of themselves, these sides being designed to give the impression of self-confidence, cleverness, 'cool', hip (!) etc. Because this is a public domain and even though no physical harm can be done to be 'real' still feels like an act of exposing your underside to attack.

To be honest, as opposed to 'fake', or not completely 'real' when it comes to being yourself, is to be braver than most. It reveals what faking it masks; that we are all prone to idiocy, ignorance, failings and a cartload of emotional responses which are either 'unacceptable' or render us weakened in the eyes of others.
 
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