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There is a problem at the heart of creation, a fundamental conflict between the desire for authenticity, both in our own work and the work of other, and our ability to critique anything and everything we see.
The hope for a comments section is that an audience gets to share their love for a creation, interact in a meaningful way with the thing or person they like. More often than not, everyone feels they can do it better. And for those who strive to grow, the only thing we can see if the critique, warranted or not, valuable or not. And if you’re particularly skilled, you don’t even need to share your work to get someone to shit all over it.
The inner critic isn’t new. Artists great and not so great have all waxed poetic about the horrors of the blank page, of the imagined critic peeking over their shoulder. A figment of their fears, same as mine, only my critic is parrots almost 20 years worth of material from user generated content online. We are not the same.
You could go with the old refrain ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’; use the reach provided by haters to further your goals, expand your reach. But if you wrap yourself up in your work, and expect that the things you make represent your intelligence, or expertise – when you strive for authenticity – every criticism feels like an act of violence against your self worth.
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I blame marketing interns, of course. The cultural drive for authenticity experienced by my generation is the natural result of a physical and digital landscape dominated by ads. Did you know that there was a time before banner ads on websites? Imagine. There was also a time before billboards. Wild. No wonder everyone fell in love with messy vloggers, sitting on the floor because their laundry was occupying their unmade bed, yapping about their mundane lives. So real.
The ubiquity of AI only makes this desire for authenticity greater. As AI brings capital content closer to perfection (as far as business analysts are concerned at least), individual creators have begun moving further into the messiness. Artists have started leaving pencil marks on their work, leaving their work unfinished. Incomplete.
The messiness is the point, showing that you’ve put the work in, developed skills that few others have, and used those skills to produce something only you could have produced. In doing so, you also affirm that quality is subjective, culturally defined. Where high quality work was once seamless, we now want to see the seams; proof that the work is authentic.
However. The critic persists. Authenticity is all well and good, but it is not sufficient for value. If you invest yourself in your work, you hope that the investment produces something meaningful, useful, of worth to others. That being said, there is nothing new under the sun.
Everything I feel at 27, I had already read about in a Tumblr meme when I was 12. Every new experience already feels cliche, because it is a cliche. We’ve mined our lives for meaning, and posted it online and in doing so, there is nothing left of value to share, nothing worth saying that hasn’t already been said a million times in a million and one different ways. So the inner critic says.
Not to mention the messiness of authenticity. How revealing it is to be honest. What if they see things in me, that I did not recognize in myself already. What if they see the things in me I do recognize in myself, the things I try to ignore or hide or change. Things I show know better about. Things that, if I Google it, I could find at least 50 solutions for. That I haven’t must mean my messiness is a choice. A deliberate act of self-sabotage and self-pity going around and around like a pair of 69ing leeches. An act of public indecency, or at least public embarrassment. The shame of it. Better to close the screen, cap the pen, put away the camera. Better that than the horror of being seen.
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Maybe the marketing interns aren’t entirely to blame. Propriety must be maintained. To be fully authentic is to risk your professionalism. Who will hire me if I talk about 69ing leeches. One must be aspirational on the internet. Polished. Enviable. What others feel about us lets us know how we are doing in life. It’s what it means to be a social animal. We are, in the presence of others.
There was this experiment where they put a bowl of candy in an office break room, sometimes with a poster of watching eyes above it, something with a random image like a cat. They wanted to see if people behaved differently when they were reminded of the potential of being observed. Predictably, visitors were more likely to take less when ‘being observed’ than when not.
When I first read about it, I thought ‘People are fundamentally selfish’. But recently, I favor a different reading: ‘People are selfish when there is no one to share with’. We make each other better, just by being around.
It is hard to reconcile this idea with the horror my inner critic invokes in me. I begin writing a line, and by the middle, I have already gone back to edit the start, cascading changes to the middle, a few more words, and then back to the start again. A work in endless flux. If I tried to show the pencil lines on my work, it would be unreadable; text on text on text, a single sentence spanning the page and going back to the start, paper drenched with ink, pixels burnt beyond repair. My inner critic has a mouth like a machine gun, criticisms rattling out like they have a death wish. How dangerous it is to be known. Hell is other people.
And yet. You are reading this. Perhaps you feel something of what I feel, agree with something of what I think. Have been charmed by this mix of professional and personal, observed as I thread the line between self-defensive and honest. Can you see the seams; proof that the work is authentic?
If so, please, LikE c0mMenT ANd suBScIbE tO mY cHaneel4 mORe!!!!!!!1