“Be Yourself” Is Terrible Advice, Whether You’re a Girl or a Boy

Leah Finnegan, The Outline — One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was: “Be yourself less.” The story goes back to 2016; just a month or two after I left the website Gawker. One of the reasons was that I live-tweeted a meeting in which my boss banged his head on a light fixture. I was 27 and going through a phase of self-purification that, unfortunately, coincided with having a national audience for my writing. The result was not good at all.

At the time, I was fascinated by the idea of expressing what I considered my unfiltered identity to a small segment of the public and media elite. I thought if people didn’t like me or what I had to say, that was their problem, and I should just be myself. When I ranted on Twitter about Slate articles, I was speaking honestly. When I wrote snarky blog posts, I was my true self, and even though my jokes didn’t always land, I never doubted the righteousness of what I thought for a single moment.

“Be yourself” is one of those vacuous self-help dictums parroted by a motley spectrum of artists, from the rock band Audioslave to Oprah Winfrey. It’s the sort of thing generally (and ironically) recommended before interacting with strangers. During my self-purification phase, I thought I was a real piece of work: someone with a biting wit who shouldn’t waste time on banal subjects, someone who might like to hold forth on the Holocaust on a first date, or insult their boss in front of everyone, especially when the guy deserved such an insult.

But then, a part of me, which was at odds with that other part I considered my true self, wondered why no one ever wanted to see me again after a first date, or why people thought I was antisocial, or contemptible, or an enemy of Slate. It wasn’t pleasant to think about. Had I achieved authenticity in isolation? An isolation devoid of social acceptance and, perhaps more importantly and more shamefully, devoid of love?

Had I insisted on myself too much, causing others to form a terrible perception of me?

Luckily for everyone, I decided to see a psychiatrist. During one of those early sessions, my kind therapist, to whom I owe the idea for all my articles, said I could easily avoid the consequences that “being myself” had brought me. All I had to do was not be what I thought “being myself” was; the main reason being that my former self was a complete jerk. The effort to be authentic, rather than leading to the expression of an immutable self, had produced one; it had produced a self I no longer wanted to be.

It took three years to fully digest this, but I think I’m now in a position to tell you why “be yourself” is such terrible advice. The first problem is that it’s impossible: there is no overarching self, meaning we are made up of various selves that emerge through countless self-examinations and experiences. Kierkegaard put it more elaborately and amusingly like this:

Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself, or [one should say] it is in the relating that the relation relates itself to itself; the self is not the relation, but that the relation relates itself to itself. Man is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity; in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. In this sense, man is not yet a self.

The second problem is that nowadays, in popular belief, feelings and inclinations are mistakenly taken for self-knowledge. Heidegger—stubbornly—held that awareness of our authentic self becomes possible through reflection on mortality. It is the feeling you get when you undergo a near-death experience. The contemporary philosopher Simon Critchley explains it in The Guardian: “If we want to know what it means to be an authentic human being, we must constantly picture our life on the horizon of our own death… Mortality is that in relation to which we shape and fashion our own self.”

Bless Wittgenstein, who had a more social view of self-knowledge. According to Jonathan Beale, one of the editors of Wittgenstein and Scientism¹, Wittgenstein “saw confession as a way to escape self-deception”. Beale writes in The New York Times that our philosopher confessed to family members and friends, both in letters and face to face. The affair was probably akin to that episode of the series “Sex and the City” where Carrie, upon seeing anyone, would talk incessantly about her breakup with Big, and her friends would tell her to see a psychiatrist.

Now that women have come up, it must be said that it is infinitely harder for women and other oppressed groups to “be themselves” in a world where white men and Nazis are roaming about to find their truth (Heidegger, too, had become a nasty Nazi). Feminist philosophers argue that women have been forced to become the social “Other”; a spanner has been thrown into all the works of their self-knowledge processes, and they have been reduced to body, not mind. Simone de Beauvoir writes: “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.” Judith Butler, in a famous theory, deemed the self an illusion; the philosopher Diana Meyers describes Butler’s view thus: “a wandering and unstable origin—the shifting intersection of multiple and wandering waves—and sexed/gendered identity is nothing but a ‘corporeal style,’ that is, the repeated imitation and performance of ubiquitous norms.”

Let me return to myself. What happened after 2017? I mean the time I decided to focus my own wandering waves on being less myself. To be honest, setting aside an agitated, internet-driven persona is truly a relief, especially if you become so carefree that you say nothing at all. It is very nice to have thoughts that you feel belong to you and not to disclose them to anyone, or to recount them only to that handful of people you are sure will understand you, or to write them on a blog whose only patrons are an elite group of your loyal readers, headed by your father and grandfather.

Let me also pontificate a little about sincerity. Like any other bespectacled, adult pseudo-intellectual, I had long hidden myself behind a shield of denial and impassivity. Yet part of finding a new dimension of myself was learning that sincerity has an essential function in everyday social life; sincerity in real life is good (unlike online life, where it is annoying).

About a year ago I got a dog, which played a fundamental role in turning me into a less obnoxious person, because I had to talk to him like a child for three hours a day, and when I took him for walks on the street, people would stop me and ask what breed he was and swoon over his missing tooth. I realized how delightful it is to stop, take pride, and talk to strangers about your dog. A few weeks ago I took my dog to the “UPS Store”² branch near my house, which is located inside a pharmacy. An elderly gentleman was picking up his medication, and the moment his eye fell on my dog, he burst out laughing. I laughed too, because I know my dog is funny, and besides, laughter is contagious. Then he gave me a broad, beaming smile to show that he had one tooth, just like my dog, who has lost one of his front teeth. He gazed into my dog’s eyes and said, “You look like me,” and hugged him affectionately. It was a beautiful moment that made me feel good about life for at least half a day.

From a Heideggerian perspective, I think my dog makes me more authentic, because every day I reflect on how devastated I would be if he died, or if I died before him, who would love him the way I do. Now that I am constantly thinking about death, the insistence on tweeting “shut your mouth” at Slate seems foolish. That is, to hell with that part of my brain that is obsessively angry at the internet and needs to tell others on the internet how angry it is at the internet.

God, is this what I’ve become? A sentimental, death-obsessed, maudlin dog lover? Was it my dog who saved me from professional and personal ruin? Did he teach me how to love? Heaven forbid! The psychiatric medications, alongside the psychotherapy sessions I mentioned earlier, helped tremendously. Nevertheless, embracing that dear angel of mine was certainly no obstacle to self-discovery.

The text editor asked me whether this maxim “be yourself” has had a negative impact on the culture. The answer is a hundred percent yes. I emailed William Swann, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and asked him to suggest a better phrase than “be yourself.” His response was very good and relevant to the present writing. He said: “One good piece of advice, for those who think ‘be yourself’ is a good thing, is to watch the leader of the free world’s speech from last weekend. If we give some people license to be themselves, the result is these speeches that are torture to watch.”

I asked other experts what advice they thought was better than “be yourself.” Simon Critchley, mentioned earlier, offered a few phrases: “How about ‘be in the world’? Or ‘don’t think, look’ or ‘turn outward, not inward’ or ‘observe well and close your eyes to your doubts,’ things like that.”

My friend John, who was kind enough to explain many of Heidegger’s theories to me during the writing of this article (so if I got something wrong, please go grab him by the collar), said: “Regularly ask yourself, is this the person I want to be?”

And finally, my other friend Kelly, someone who has never gotten herself involved in Twitter squabbles, and has never told a single person “shut your mouth” (she only says it to the New York subway), offers an interesting counterpoint for those who don’t have a loud, prickly personality, meaning those who perhaps need to be themselves more, not less:

Unfortunately, I think the best advice comes from Nike, and that advice is: “Just do it.” “Be yourself” is nonsense, because you are usually being yourself when you are indulging your worst tendencies. If I were to “be myself,” I would stay in bed all day and not talk to anyone; that is my true self. Many times I have been paralyzed by the fear of failure or humiliation, and I have lost many friendships, experiences, and career opportunities because I am so nervous and shy. But that is precisely the moment when Nike’s “Just do it” appears. All the good things I have came about because I tried, again and again and again, to do exactly what I want. Or because I said yes to intimidating things, right at the moment when I desperately wanted to turn them down. I think “Just do it” is good advice.

So there you have it. “Be yourself” is bad advice, especially if you’re a garbage person, but probably even if you’re not, it’s still bad advice. Now, in the same blunt, magnanimous, self-reflective tone in which I wrote this piece, I want to have the last word. I want to say to that editor who, in 2015, while we were having coffee and talking about my career future, told me I “have a personality problem”: “Shut your mouth.”

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Endnotes:

• This piece was written by Leah Finnegan and published on March 6, 2019, under the title “Be yourself is terrible advice” on The Outline website. The website Tarjomaan published it on April 27, 2019, under the title “‘Be Yourself’ Is Terrible Advice, Whether You’re a Girl or a Boy”, translated by Arash Rezapour.

•• Leah Finnegan is a writer and the executive editor of The Outline website. She has written for most English-language publications, such as The New York Times and The Huffington Post. On her personal blog, she has written: “At least one blogger says this about my writings: ‘The best thing you’ll get these days from someone suffering from indigestion.’”

[۱] Wittgenstein and Scientism

[۲] UPS store: The world’s largest company providing postal, printing, shipping, packaging, and similar services [Translator].

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