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Beyond Authenticity
instead of focusing on training techniques or the acquisition of new skills, they described choosing opportunities that fit their truest self. Even in the face of all the mundane struggles of everyday life, such as bills, babies, family tragedies, and economic downturns, they strived for authenticity. For a sense that their individuality mattered.
Todd Rose • Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment
Kierkegaard said that the greatest hazard of all is losing oneself — dangerous because it occurs so quietly. To be fully ourselves, then, is a thunderous feat. It is to resist the inertia of comfort and conformity and half-lived lives; to engage in the deliberate, demanding act of self-authorship rather than assuming a role that has already been wr... See more
Taylor called this authenticity, and it became the unreachable horizon of modern life. It’s a concept that makes sense only in its absence; we recognize inauthenticity, phoniness, when someone’s clearly being a poseur. Yet the struggle to feel authentic—this is very real, even if we know better. In Taylor’s telling, everyone becomes a kind of artis
... See moreHua Hsu • Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Or do such Sisyphean philosophies—that “the road is life”—turn out to be bourgeois luxuries indulged by those safe enough to pretend this is all there is? Does the hunger and hope of the migrant show us something more fundamentally human? Maybe our craving for rest, refuge, arrival, home is a hunger that can’t be edited—the heart an obstinate palim
... See moreJames K. A. Smith • On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts
What does it mean for a human being to be? (I realize this is starting to sound like a bad comedy sketch about philosophers lost in wild abstractions. I’m afraid that’s going to get worse for another couple of paragraphs before it gets better.) His answer is that our being is totally, utterly bound up with our finite time. So bound up, in fact, tha... See more