Everyone’s telling you to be real.
Strangers. Celebrities. Entrepreneurs. Grifters. Scammers. Your mother. Your grandmother. Your neighbor. Your conscience. Yourself. Your fortune cookie. Your misdirected daydream on the way to the subway station. Your fleeting idea that left its origins in the bunker of your past and found footing in a sticky note you taped to your desktop drawer.
Now, there’s a hypnotic dilemma.
Do you want to confront that tiny voice inside? Or should that wait for another day? Perhaps it should wait. The best ideas require incubation, after all. While this is scientifically true, you’ll—still—have opinionated backs-and-forth on this topic with strangers who would rather order you to “stop being so fast” instead of taking their own advice.
But then you have to circle back and wonder if these people—yourself, included, with those troublesome thoughts and daydreams alike—really know what “being real” truly means?
Mental destruction aside, this is one of those culturally devoured and vomited statements that’s been recycled into oblivion.
It’s been tossed, turned, rotisseried, chipped, burned, and goopified like the most charred, gushiest marshmallow you can think of after its begged you to take it away from the goddamn fire.
This sentiment can come seriously, and perhaps, non-inaccurately, from the mouth of an influencer snapping a picture of themselves smiling on a beach in Bali, who’s never known how to actually embody this philosophy their entire, short, manicured life—while also convincing themselves they are, by all accounts, “being real,” because it makes them feel vindicated for trading who they are for making money on the internet through means they don’t prefer, but feel they must do so in order to conquer the mysterious Gods and Goddesses of Good Fortune that plague their social feeds. And their brains.
This isn’t to shame influencers. This conscious and unconscious misunderstanding of what “being real” means extends through all methods of work, and every type of worker. Corporate juggernauts. Entrepreneurs. Artists, too. No one is really “safe” from this butchered piece of language. They’re haunted by it. We are all trying to make our own path in the world, and we all—for the most part—seek methods of becoming successful through what we wish to do.
What’s interesting is that, at least in western media and tech culture, it seems we’re obsessed with this idea that “being real” opens the gate to authenticity. This authenticity is then what connects us to things like success, money, relationships, love, beauty. Take your pick. We all want some version, or versions, of these things for ourselves.
This is not something to shame, but something to acknowledge.
Are we acquiring these things of pleasure and temptation and presumed look Mom, I made it! rewards because we’re actually being our most honest selves, or are we acquiring them—or seeking to acquire them—because we’ve conditioned ourselves into following what everyone else wants, and we no longer remember who we were meant to be to begin with?
If you’re to ask someone close to you right now to tell you what “being real” means from their perspective—whether that’s in a taxi, in a cafe close to you, or perhaps even a friend over a coffee—they might give you the simplest, clearest, most sensible definition known to man: “Being real means you don’t pretend to be something else. You’re not being fake.”
This feels so obvious.
As most things worth thinking about, however, it’s never that simple.
In psychology, Occam’s Razor encourages that the simplest explanation might be the most likely true answer. I always try to subscribe to this belief system when I approach something new. Not as the final thought, exactly, but as the introductory argument. I believe nothing good comes from assuming the overblown before you have any evidence to back it.
That being said, this age of “slopification” and an oft-celebrated butchering of language as an all-encompassing world of systems, architecture, and ingrained beliefs threaded from culture to culture, generation to generation, person to person, and beyond this ornate tapestry that invites us to play in its weavings like a kindergartener discovering their imagination in a sandbox, it’s getting more difficult to believe what’s in front of me.
It’s becoming near-impossible, in fact, to believe the simplest explanation truly is the most understandable. Occam’s Razor, dulled upon application.
Artificial intelligence has donned its crown as a God of Mischief, and it threatens a perception that I once deeply trusted. It’s hard not to feel angry about this, as well, when you realize what this means for individuals who will follow suit, perhaps destined for an intelligent and meaningful life, only to squander their potential in the systemic flood of spiritual carnage.
What does it mean to be real, at all—in any timeline, any system, any practice? Whether you’re constrained by it, motivated by it, or curious to discover what it means for you, and the future you wish to carve for yourself? What does it mean to embody the person you yearn to become, but have unknowingly discarded?
What does this concept mean for the makers? The thinkers? The movers? The artists? The definers? The critics? The judges? The people who are defined by the work they create and further judged for said work? The people who live and die by the attention of the self and the validation of the universe? The people who are too stubborn to conform to others’ rules, but the second they feel insecure, they will flock to the closest reinvention station available, tickets punched and pockets emptied? The people who are responsible for determining whether descendants centuries from now will look at the work of this time, and find themselves embroiled in interest?
I don’t have an answer for you.
I know some people might find it pointless that I’m bothering to reveal that so early on in this discussion, to break the fourth wall with disappointing, anticlimactic, cloud-soft aplomb… but I truly don’t.
I’m not an expert trying to convince you that I know all the answers.
While this seems to be the method of persuasion and trust-building most people use when writing on the internet, I’m not interested in pretending to be more aware than I am.
I’m sharing this topic with you—as well as every other little thing that peppers this newsletter’s intestinal columns of meanderings and ramblings and incubating thoughtstreams—with you because I’ve built conscious awareness around what I absolutely do not know, and I want to use that awareness to pursue the curiosity.
Perhaps, at the end of this trail of curiosity, I will find an answer.
Or, you will, if you pursue it yourself.
We all have paths of curiosity worth taking, worth exploring. There are answers in front of you that might take the rest of your life to discover. Even when you think it should be so obvious that it emits a smell, like the world’s most untraceable perfume, you will go after it anyway, because the thought of not progressing post-awareness due to a lack of conviction is more painful than the acceptance of not knowing, period. It might cost you everything, but it’s certainly worth the attempt, isn’t it?
Perhaps this is one way to “be real.”
I do think about this, often:
The pursuit of what makes us curious, in an attempt to understand something that pretends to be unknowable. The hidden costs of the process, as everything worth chasing has a cost. The fragments of negative and positive possibility that all lead to a strange, unpredictable ending.
For me, there is no switch to flip. No command to listen to. No verb to take under my wing that constitutes “being real.” I just… am. There is no “being real.” There is no conscious thought put into the action.
But, does that mean I’m being my most honest self?
My “authentic” self?
I would say, no.
The reason I say no, is because this directly connects to a topic that I’m building an entire body of work around.
It’s all about self-creation, and what that means for the individual.
“Being real” is just one of many language-based, cultural signals that people try to use to connect with others, while understanding extremely little about themselves. Their desperation to “be real” and connect with as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, comes at the consequence of their lack of understanding what they truly want, and think.
(And, at the risk of being obnoxious, by “I,” I’m referring to “we,” which pertains to anyone who might relate to this. It’s very easy to get absorbed into the collective mantra that something might be referring to you when it’s actually not)
As you are reading this, I’m assuming some part of your identity squirms at the thought of the “act” of “being real,” when all you’ve understood your entire life is to walk in your own shoes.
There is no invention to be had, nor is there any need to assimilate the ideas of another to make yourself more palatable. Or presentable.
Every human—whether they realize this truth or not—suffers from the question of “how to be real” on a daily basis. If not daily, it’s frequent enough to become a signal that we experience on and beyond the screens sapping our concentration by the minute. By the second.
I’m constantly discovering and creating new things about myself—not to prove anything to anyone, but to pursue the curious triggers within that are begging to be heard, and understood, and indulged. The “itchiness” artists get when they don’t create is a universally understood phenomenon that every person I’ve talked to who creates for a living—or enjoys creating the most out of everything they do—knows to be a fact of the self.
It’s likely you are the same. My guess as to why this is, is because this is what it’s like to be constantly self-observant, but in the same breath, constantly second-guessing.
If you are creative, you have a strong imagination. You have an astronomical bedrock of ideas. You have many ways of communicating those ideas. You might find yourself hitting stone walls, and you might find yourself swimming upstream against a current of flames. All the time. Every day. And there’s a significantly high chance you overthink yourself into a corner—where you face the black void of consumption that tempts you to fear the breadth and depth of your own work, if only to distract you.
If this is the truth and you recognize yourself within that truth, we might know each other without knowing each other.
You could argue that artists—or creatives, if you want to extend that bridge, for they are not the same categorical thing—understand the act and exploration of “being real” better than anyone. This is because to create phenomenal art(work), you have to confront the deep, the hideous, and the ugly and the beautiful and all the in-between parts of yourself that are necessary to make something extraordinary.
It seems that now, in this age of consumption and personality-stripped “content” that drowns our attention and seeks to drain us of our individual thinking among this strange obsessive championing for intellectually inferior groupthink—that no one feels inclined to naturally look inward.
They’re more interested in gaining short-term attention through signaling to other brilliant minds trapped in cycles of destructive creativity-bleeding.
It’s a masochistic ritual in the digital and physical world to publicly ask for strangers and friends alike to “be real” when you have barely understood what it means to be yourself.
Now, if I remove the quotes around that, and simply treat the phrase as what it’s meant to be—a reminder to look inside, to listen to the self, to recognize the unfolding of the imagination as it pulls and tugs and builds—what does it feel like?
“Be real” is an identification.
I’m referencing the idea that most people in modern social media culture have come to understand as a call for others to drop performative acts, but not by any objective rules. They’re calling attention to things that might fall under their unwritten jurisdiction, but certainly nothing proven in the often-imagined Dictionary of Only Correct Things. (An affliction all of us have ingrained within us, to some extent, though I fail to prove anything about this beyond my bullish intuition that insists not everything can be perfectly described through the necessary lull of science and data alone).
To be real, is to be real.
It’s language that can transform the very method of how we speak to ourselves, one movement at a time. It’s an internal calling shaped by the little things we refuse to ignore, despite how often we try to shut them out—those ideas that flicker behind your eyes before your dreams take you; the way you smile without thinking at strangers who have an unshakeable aura. It’s the way things happen and appear on your face and in your heart before you have a chance to sculpt it into something societally, socially, or professionally acceptable.
To be real is to be real is to be real.
And I’m wondering if anyone truly understands what this means anymore. What the cost of ignoring this really is. There’s a daily influx of literally hundreds of thousands of articles, podcast episodes, blogs, and social media posts instructing you to be “real” without knowing what that means. This is not entirely the fault of the individual, as I argue that most of us are not aware of how deep this goes. In the same breath, I fear to see the consequence of humanity on the brink of failing to remember what it means to not to be real, but to be themselves.
Because that’s what we risk the most, if we fail to understand the connective tissue that makes us real, as individuals. Despite what collectivist minds preach, we can’t leave behind ourselves and try to “discover” what’s real within the gatherings and opinions of others. We need to get in touch with what’s inherently ingrained within us. I believe we all have these callings, these interests that no one else has influenced.
We are all born from the womb of our mother. Whether we have siblings, or we emerge alone, we are all separate entities. As children we’re drawn to things that have no connection to anyone else. I was drawn to writing and telling stories as soon as I learned how to talk. This was not an accident. It was ingrained within me. No one needed to tell me how to be interested in anything, and no one encouraged this specific vocation. I always knew, before I knew. Somehow.
Now, with that belief, I have to also assume that the act of being real is tied directly to this. There is no need to try and justify yourself as “being real” to others if you know that you’re not being real to yourself.
Maybe that’s the first barrier we need to break.
This strange, invisible, imposing wall that towers above us, that promises rewards of great discovery and even greater creative execution. How painful and ironic this lie is.
I fear that if we abandon those intuitive messages calling for us to be real before we ever “try” to be real for the sake of acceptance, and clamor for the approval of others for the rest of our lives, that we’re truly—without any awareness until the game of life ends—succumbing ourselves to the grandest joke of them all:
Pretending until we die, without ever truly knowing.
— Taylor Barnes.