Picture a bunch of relatively impecunious PhD students, in an effortlessly mangy pub, in a Scottish fishing village. A fellow apprentice philosopher, American, puffs at her cigarette and coughs out some angst: “So I guess this grad school thing isn’t working out for me. No jobs, no nothing. I’m going back to California and, like, get a cushy job with my family’s real estate company.” Me, inadequately: “Mmm-hmm.” Her: “Y’know, imagine me at a party, telling someone I’m a realtor. People are gonna run a mile. And I’m gonna be bored out of my mind.” “In a sense”, I reply, “You might be right.” Was she?
It seems to me there are two things going on in our friend’s lamentation. First, the worry about becoming a centrifugal force for fellow partiers. I’m going to suggest that’s about authenticity, or lack thereof. Second, the worry about bottomless tedium. Arguably that’s about alienation. Let’s take the two issues in turn, and then see how they may relate to each other.
Authenticity: the rough idea is that you’re an authentic person only if you are true to yourself, or at one with yourself, or the way you present is the same as the way you are— not that these are exactly the same. So why would an estate agent be suspected of being inauthentic? Presumably my friend worried that flogging houses isn’t many people’s idea of a true calling. Or it just that this wasn’t her true calling, and she worried that people would clock that. Either way, there’s an element of blame associated with inauthenticity: the inauthentic person has made a rotten compromise, and so is blameworthy.
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