What's Changing? - Authenticity

 

Please see below selected recent authenticity-related change.

 

See also:

• What's New? - Authenticity
• What's Changing? - Honesty
• What's Changing? - Therapy
• What's Changing? - Truth

 

November 2024

• The authenticity of a place is about its unique character and essence – the way it is rooted in its cultural, historical, spiritual and experiential dimensions. When participants in studies were asked to recall a time when they were connected to themselves and the place they were in, they reported a heightened sense of place authenticity and personal authenticity in the experience they wrote about. In other words, the emotional and psychological ties people have with places contribute to their perception of authenticity.

 

June 2024

• In How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment, Skye C. Cleary described Simone de Beauvoir’s view that happiness might be a privilege only accessible to a few, warning against pursuing it at the expense of self-interest or short-termism. De Beauvoir believed that authentic happiness is intertwined with the freedom of others, and while we can find happiness amidst the world’s miseries, true fulfilment arises from understanding our existence and striving for freedom without oppressing others. 

 

March 2024

• Knowing and understanding who we are can help us to live more authentically. This doesn’t necessarily make life easier, but it can make our priorities clearer, help us feel more energised and motivated, and decrease feelings of self-doubt. Many people seek out advice or coaching due to a desire to have more purpose and meaning in their lives, and to help them live more authentically.

 

September 2023

• A new platform used generative AI to allow users to augment their photos with fantastical visual effects and according to Future Normal, this is a powerful signal of the fact that creativity and expression are as important as authenticity. We all have multiple identities, and the multiverse allows us to explore them.

 

June 2023

• 76% of metaverse users in the US, UK, and China claimed that their avatars better convey their "unique individuality" compared with the real world, according to a 2023 report by Wunderman Thompson. To meet this demand, digital avatars are becoming more expressive, diverse, and are amassing millions of users. Advancements in generative AI and 3D technologies mean it's now possible to infer emotions, behaviors and interactions onto digital counterparts, e.g. Adidas introduced dynamic NFTs, which adapt and evolve based on users' decisions and engagement. Microsoft Teams rolled out customisable 3D avatars with reaction features and TikTok launched AI-powered avatars.

 

December 2022

• Further reading: 
  • Authenticity at work doesn’t look the same for everyone - Financial Times

 

April 2022

• The School of Life warned that the real danger for most people is not that they ignore others in the name of their own needs, it’s precisely the opposite: that they constantly put aside authentic inner development for the whims of so-called respectable opinion.
• Søren Kierkegaard believed that being authentic meant breaking from cultural and social constraints and living a self-determined life; Martin Heidegger equated authenticity to accepting who you are today and living up to all the potential you have in the future and Jean-Paul Sartre had a similar idea: people have the freedom to interpret themselves, and their experiences, however they like. 
• Psychologists in the early 21st century started to characterise what an authentic person looks like. They settled on some criteria: e.g. an authentic person is supposed to be self-aware and willing to learn what makes them who they really are. After deciding what defines the true self, the authentic person will then behave in a way that is true to those characteristics, and avoid being “false” or “fake” merely to please others. Some researchers used this framework to create measurement scales that can test how authentic a person is. In this view, authenticity is a psychological trait – a part of someone’s personality. However, more recent work argued that this traditional definition of authenticity might fall short and in fact the feeling of authenticity is actually an experience of "fluency".

 

March 2022

• In her 60s, Simone de Beauvoir wrote a 650-page book La vieillesse, to reveal the truth about ageing. She argued that ageing isn’t only a biological decline: society crushes ageing bodies through ageist discrimination. And yet, Beauvoir noted, elderhood also has the potential to bring us closer to authenticity than at any other stage of life. For her, being authentic means becoming creators of our vibrant selves, shaped through our choices. But older people face myriad challenges that warp their choices and deter them from stretching towards authenticity. Old age, for Beauvoir, should be celebrated, but to have something to celebrate, we must keep working towards a better world, one free from ageism, so that all are free to create themselves in authentic ways, and where no one has to exist as a living corpse. 

 

January 2022

• Research studies have affirmed the importance of authenticity as a key driver of overall work outcomes for everyone from frontline workers to leaders. Alternatively, being perceived as inauthentic has been shown to destroy trust and relationships, damage customer loyalty, worsen performance evaluations, and decrease organisational profits, noted HBR.

 

November 2021

• For Psyche, the central question in the last life stage is: have I led an authentic, meaningful life? It requires us to ask whether we’ve lived according to our core values, followed our moral compass and acted consistently in the direction it points. A sense of fulfilment promotes not only satisfaction with a life well lived, with few regrets, but also a feeling of contentment and the wisdom to face death with a sense of equanimity and completion.

 

August 2021

• A survey of 2,000 adults in the UK, Australia and the US by IT company Stackla in 2019 found that 86% considered a brand’s authenticity to be important when deciding whether to support it or not. A fifth of respondents said that they had unfollowed at least one brand on social media because they felt that the content it was producing was too corporate or insincere. Authenticity matters even more to younger people. According to a 2020 poll, 72% of under-25s said that they would be more likely to buy from a brand that contributes to good causes. What’s more, consumers can easily see through firms that treat charitable donations as a proxy for truly socially conscious behaviour. 

 

April 2021

• As an ethical ideal – as a standard of what it is good to be, both in the way that we relate to ourselves and others – authenticity means more than self-consistency or a lack of pretentiousness. It also concerns features of the inner life that define us. While there is no one ‘essence’ of authenticity, the ideal has often been expressed as a commitment to being true to yourself, and ordering your soul and living your life so as to give faithful expression to your individuality, cherished projects and deepest convictions.

 

January 2020

• The COE Of Korn Ferry argued that being authentic is the only way to bridge the barriers caused by the pandemic - physical distance, emotional separation, social divides, and even Zoom calls. We must show who we truly are, what motivates us, and what we believe about the future. None of us can gaze at our reflection and self-proclaim, “I’m so authentic.” It doesn’t work that way. Authenticity needs to be experienced by others in dialogue and relationships. As David Dotlich, Ph.D., a CEO and board advisor and a senior leader at Korn Ferry, observed, that means leading not only with our heads - ideas, strategies, and analytics - but more important from our hearts and our guts, with empathy and courage. 

 

December 2019

• TIME’s Editor-at-Large Anand Giridharadas argues that while the winners of our age - especially big businesses - might be well meaning in their desire to give back, too many stop short at the kinds of real change that would see power more radically distributed.
• Authenticity, the sense that something or someone is real, original, genuine, true to their word, is a quality that carries significant cultural and emotional capital. If a brand or personality appears to have it, then they win trust from consumers. The opposite, appearing to be fake, insincere, derivative, is what brands must avoid at all costs.

 

August 2019

• "Cultural" authenticity is believed by many to have a very exclusive, dark side, Cultural purity and authenticity are, in reality, imaginary yardsticks that we use to evaluate insiders and outsiders. They are entirely artificial measurements and things, peoples, and practices slip across those “boundaries”, and change in the process. Folklorist Regina Bendix is very clear about ways in which cultural authenticity itself is a problematic and sometimes unhelpful concept: "Removing authenticity and its allied vocabulary is one useful step toward conceptualising the study of culture in the age of transculturation."

 

July 2019

• People want to feel authentic at work. If an employee or candidate cares about the environment or access to education or being a caring parent, for example, they don’t want their professional responsibilities to interfere with these values or force them to compromise on them. They want to feel like they can express who they are fully at work, without being judged negatively or missing out on development and advancement opportunities; that, for the Harvard Business Review, is the idea of enabling people to bring their “whole selves” to work.

 

June 2019

• Quartz believes that authenticity is what influencers are supposed to lend the brands they promote on Instagram and other platforms. Marketers value their content as more honest and grounded than traditional advertising. Influencers say their sponsored posts are authentic because they genuinely like and use the products they promote. But those posts are also intentionally meant to blend in with their organic content. For consumers, this can raise questions. When am I being advertised to? Is this ad copy, or someone’s real opinion? But this central tenet of the influencer economy is also the fulcrum of most of its problems. Governments are trying to mandate this authenticity and regulate the sector, but it’s been slow going. The amount of content is massive, and the legal lines are vague. 
• The Outline criticised the middle class trend for mending and making do, arguing that there is something disturbing about the impulse to buy artificial austerity at a markup. There is a bored  spirit that has become exhausted by the world it owns: its resources, its pleasures, its elegances and civilities. Its entitlement is so complete that its only remaining move is to bowdlerise and deconstruct.

 

July-August-September 2018

• Many people increasingly appear to feel an explicit need for "authenticity" in their work and in the rest of their lives.
• Some seek "authentic transformation" and would like to be able to communicate with others and solve problems in an authentic way.
• Authenticity is also becoming an important issue in business. Authentic leadership involves business people beginning to look for perennial spiritual truths as the source for a new, deeper, and higher perspective from which to engage in the global marketplace. However, there is much inauthentic lip service posturing out there too.
• Yet this need for being authentic is not so new. For example, "L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme" by Jean-Paul Sartre, with its stress on authenticity, dates from 1946. Today though, the idea seems to be gathering pace, with for example a fast-growing emphasis on the principles of authentic education.