Transcendence constitutes selfhood
A new study by Alison Lenton is one of the first to investigate what being true to oneself actually feels like. […]
Participants describing a time they’d felt authentic, as opposed to phony, tended to say the experience overlapped far more with their ideal self. There’s an obvious contradiction here. If they were being themselves, how come they resembled their ideal self, which is likely to be influenced by social expectations? One possibility is that what we really mean by “be true to yourself” is “be the person you want to be”.
photo { Danny Lyon, Union Square station, New York City, 1966 }
