Your "Highest Self" will always be performative and that's OK
This is NOT about liking matcha, listening to Clairo, and nonchalantly reading War and Peace at a cafe
Imagine you really like watching magic, and your favourite magician gives you a behind-the-scenes look at his entire bag of tricks – every single gag and trick, deconstructed, described, and placed in front of you. Whether you walk out continuing to view magic as ✨magical✨ OR as fake and stupid thereon seems like it’s entirely up to your disposition. There’s a whole bunch of factors that come to mind: your sense of awe and child-like wonder, your ability to detach reality from the core of what makes seeing magic so breathtaking – the list goes on.
Self-help slop
What allows one to walk away from such a demonstration, still choosing to view magic as … well … magical?
I ask this because I’ve seen a few friends who suddenly began reading a ton of pop-psych and philosophy material walk out even more angsty and supposedly unfulfilled (often describes as the general feeling of “ughhhhh” about life). They’d experience something debilitating (a breakup, a career change, family troubles, etc) and employ some of the so-called “lessons” they haphazardly picked up to self-regulate and hopefully get in touch with their “highest self”1. Even if they’d genuinely want to become their highest self with some intrinsic motivation, they’d run into similar issues. This includes stuff like,
Reframing the situation into something positive. Eg: telling yourself “I get to do sucky-XYZ-task” instead of “ugh, I have to do sucky-XYZ-task”, or “I’m happy XYZ-bittersweet-thing happened to me in the first place” instead of “XYZ-bittersweet-thing is over and I’ll never get those moments back”.
Maintaining some journal, writing down one thing that made you feel grateful despite all the bad happening in your life (it could literally be a cool, shiny rock you saw on the street) to bring yourself back into the present.
Grounding yourself by naming five things around you that you can smell, touch, feel and see. Sure, it’s helpful but come on … does it really ever help if you go back to thinking about whatever was making you angsty? An angsty, impatient mind is an elastic band: the more you pull away, the greater its prediliction to resist.
In doing all this, a part of them would scream “you’re just gaslighting yourself” and they’d immediately shut down because they know they’re just tricking themselves into feeling better about their situation. They’d see through the “lies” they’re telling themselves and it’d come off as cope. All this talk about being your “highest self” would seem fake, performative, sometimes downright cringe, and an almost impossible feat to convince themselves of otherwise given their stubbornness (or a self-blaming or victimising tendency). In all fairness, it’s a pretty quick way to immediately dig yourself into a hole. For a while, I felt like this too.
Now, older and slightly less dense, if you ever find yourself in such a situation where the thought of self-actualising and enhancing your agency seem performative and fake, it’s okay to feel that way.
It’s so easy to throw brainpower at the many problems in our heads, hoping that the more we think about them all, the more easily the solution will fall into our laps. And when you do all this thinking, there’s a knot in your head that just does not want to be undone – and that knot is exactly the source of angst, and depending on who you are, the compulsion to self-actualise and remove said angst. But when you actually try doing something about it, then come the feelings of performativeness and cringe, with the usual afterthought of “why am I even doing this?” and “am I even genuine about wanting to improve myself?”.
I’ve come to realise it doesn’t matter if you’re genuinely trying to improve yourself or you’re acting by doing things to improve yourself. Eventually, you’ll realise they’re one and the same, and chances are you’ll not be able to tell the difference between the two. Your feelings towards those very pro-individuation actions should not be harshly considered because said feelings are solely born out of and should hold no bearing over said actions. On the outside, as long as you’re actually feeling less angsty about life and fewer things seem to weigh you down or kill your thunder, you’re pretty much set.
Shamelessly being performative
Here’s something that took me many fun years to reconcile and accept:
When striving to be your “highest self”, you’ll always feel performative because the highest self is beyond your current sense of reality.
You will always lack the emotional and spiritual vocabulary to describe it, and you shouldn’t try so hard to thingify it. You’ll only get more angsty the more you do it.
This is true regardless of whichever philosophy you like (eg: Nietzsche’s Übermensch, Plato’s Philosopher-King, the Bhagavad Gita’s Sthitaprajna, Jung’s Das Selbst). Sure, you can imagine what your highest self will be doing in terms of tangible activities, but when you really try to feel what it’s like to be your highest self, and to really step into its shoes, you’ll probably feel fake, performative, even cringey – and that’s OK2.
In Existentialism is a Humanism, there’s a neat section on anguish. Sartre says people feel the purest form of anguish when they feel like every action they perform will be put under the microscope and used by humanity to measure itself up against (spooky stuff). Essentially, it’s the tightness in the chest you experience when you feel the weight of some responsibility on your shoulder, as if you need to get everything right to prove yourself3. You’ll wonder whether you’ll ever truly self-actualise and whether you really have it in you to become it; it’s only natural.
What I find more relevant is Sartre’s eventual comment about writer André Gide, who says true feelings are no different from playacting (ie, pretentiousness)4.
Invariably, if the steps you take to self-actualise and become your highest self are the same whether you pretend to do it or genuinely want to do it, you should not really worry about any feelings of performativeness that ensue. And sure, you can be highly genuine about this sort of stuff (and it’s even encouraged) because you believe it’s your duty to be an upstanding individual. There is no difference.
Of course, this is not to be mistaken with a sly, deceitful, cunning form of pretentiousness, but to accept that you don’t need to achieve an intrinsically authentic state of being to do something (good) for yourself (ie, to self-actualise); chances are you’ll never really know even if you’ve reached that authentic state. Even if you pretend to want it for yourself, it’s as good as being genuine about it, so long as it brings about the same set of actions that work towards those goals. Your feelings of performativeness and cringe (and possibly shame) as a result of taking steps to self-actualise should not be used a north star to guide further action (or inaction).
Midwit Performative vs Sage Performative
It’s natural to get gung ho over wanting to self-actualise and feel a certain sense of “yaaaaaaa!!!!” when doing things that align with what your highest self would do despite the supposed pretentiousness. But it’s very easy to get carried away and believe that being performative about all this self-actualisation stuff is the way to go. Why? Because you run the risk of doing it like a midwit.
How do you know you’re being performative in a desirable way and not falling into midwittery? At the expense of making this post longer than it should be, go check out Sarv’s post on Midwittery first (or at least skim it). Once you understand the predispositions of being a midwit about the things you do (including trying to become your “highest self”), you’ll start to realise that you don’t need to take over-the-top steps to getting good at them (as midwits do) nor should you excessively signal to the outside world that you’re trying to self-actualise (as midwits do as well), but you’ll still always feel fake and performative the more you subconsciously make progress. Midwit performativeness has a constant PR aspect to it, where you outwardly sell the idea that you’re self-actualising (eg: quoting without reading and understanding, preaching and overly giving advice to people, thingifying everything around you, packaging it nicely to look profound) instead of actually putting in the work for it (which is silent in its own way without the need to prove yourself or show that you’re someone you’re not). I’ve also started to believe that self-actualisation is actually a side-effect of how you choose to spend the present moment, never the objective.
This isn’t so much about “trusting the (non-linear) process” as it is about simply accepting that your highest self cannot take a tangible form – and what cannot take form in your mind cannot really be put into words by you. You can try approximating it but again, the more you try to imagine your highest self, the sillier you’ll feel. I think it should be quite similar to how young children can’t quite grasp being an adult yet still aspire to be one without feeling the burden of being overly cringey or performative5. They’ll definitely feel silly about it and giggle but it’s not as demoralising or soul-crushing as we make self-actualisation out to be in our minds.
What does matter then?
At the meta level, what really dampens the feelings of fear, shame, and performativeness is the encompassing feelings of safety and security that naturally develop with time as you get better at telling yourself it’s OK to be performative here6.
I’m realising now, more than ever, that a lot of the undue stress and fear we have in ourselves stems from a lack of safety in feeling something otherworldly; there’s this intimidation in feeling something so out of your realm of being (here, the feelings associated with wanting to self-actualise) – and when you try to self-actualise and feel cringey about it, it’s just your body not being able to feel safe doing exactly that.
Eventually, you do get better with accepting that you don’t need to be ultra-genuine about self-actualisation and will do it regardless of your feelings about your actions. This is not to be mistaken as “allowing yourself to be fake” but as giving yourself the platform to feel safe about it all. There’s a certain self-directed kindness in being able tell your body (not mind) to gradually unload the fear it experiences as you attempt to reach your highest self.
So yes, I don’t think there’s any reason to worry about our true intentions for wanting to self-actualise. Are you genuine about it? Are you performative about it? It really doesn’t matter. What does matter is you allowing yourself to feel safe about being performative and still carry out the actions that put you on the direction of approximating your highest self – it’s always a vector, never a single point.
There was a brief period of time after reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche, when I’d legitimately believe I should do everything in my power to become some sort of Übermensch. Pretty cringey, in hindsight, but I think the vibe is still there and (thankfully) has been replaced with wanting to just be more chill in life, and I’m not so over-the-top about it anymore. You live and you learn …
Consider the myth of the “10x engineer”. People scoff about becoming one, as if it’s an unattainable goal. This is a modern-day example of being your “highest self” in the context of what you do (eg: software stuff). It sounds performative and fake precisely because it’s out of your current realm of reality, and you don’t feel safe and secure feeling what it’s like to be a 10x engineer.
Reading this hit wayyyy closer to home than I had expected. I think it’s so easy to get caught up with thinking you need to carry the weight of the world on your shoulder and everything depends on you. You are not Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible, the only man who can save the world. You are probably 20-something. Relax about it. And even if you are in an objectively tough spot in life, it’s still possible to view life with a sense of passion and hope (please try!).
If your head immediately goes in the direction of “that’s like being a fake person, I don’t like it”, it’s natural but you might be too quick to judge. I urge you to read on, it gets better, I promise.
I’m sure we all have friends who said “I can’t wait to grow up” and felt silly about it while still aspiring for it.
Somatic exercises (or therapy) are exactly what help you do this well. I’ve been reading a ton of material and practicing a lot of it and it’s been fantastic! I’m definitely dropping a separate post on it soon.