Idk if you consider this fake or not, but there’s considerably more plastic surgery, Botox, veneers, teeth bleaching, and appearance oriented behaviors these days. Especially in movies, but also in real life. There’s not a single actor with natural teeth now, except for Steve Buschimi. Even he probably bleaches his teeth. You used to see people everywhere as they were naturally. Now it’s very common to see people who have had cosmetic procedures done. There’s also a lot more bodybuilding and body sculpting now. That one is possibly a positive, since it contributes to a person’s overall health. Go watch a movie from the 70’s. The actors look like real people. Now every actor looks like digitally sculpted perfection.
Because 20 years of social media have programed people to behave in very fake, upvote/like/positive attention dopamine reward center overdriving manners of actions to maximize attention and reward.
As in misinformation and decimation of fictitious information yes social media has given everyone a megaphone. It’s also easier to find people who have similar conspiratorial views and spiral down into believing and contributing to fake news etc. and the general feeling that you can trust something to be real and not something yelled at you from a big megaphone.
As with individuals, I’m not sure where I read it first and I don’t feel like googling it now but…
Everyone has three selves: a public persona, a private persona and a personal persona.
Public is strait forward it’s the face/mask/personality one has in public with strangers, acquaintances, and some work colleagues.
Private is your personality with very close friends and family. Things you would not do or say in public but would around your close circle.
Personal is the inner you that you share with no one. Your inner thoughts, your conscience, your inner voice and inner monologue.
This is generally by a spectrum that blend into one another and change over time rather than three separate buckets. As you get older and more aware of these different perspectives some people act more like they are buckets not a spectrum. These people seem much more fake especially if you ever see their public and private personas. You may have just seen this for the first time.
You touched on something that makes sense, but for me personally it takes more than just having different public vs private personas for a person to seem fake.
Many people naturally have a different demeanor or way of interacting in public than private, which doesn’t necessarily make them seem fake. What feels fake is when you can pick up on a deliberate or curated public persona, especially if it’s being done deceptively or for some material gain.
My favorite psychology professor likes to discuss the relationship between the level of fakeness in a society and the rise of totalitarianism in that same society. He says that when everybody lies more on a regular basis, even about small things, it lets bad things start to happen. And as the bad things start to happen, these people who lie about little things all the time can easily dupe themselves about the fact the bad things are happening, because they’ve gotten used to investing their mental energy into fake narratives.
Basically each problem gives a person the opportunity to tell the truth about the problem, which usually results in them having to do something about it to assuage their own conscience, or to lie about the problem, which makes space for them to act as if the problem isn’t there. It’s less scary and takes less work to lie, so we do it when we don’t feel like taking on the responsibility of the problem.
Then it becomes a cultural habit — something we do because we see others doing it and we’d rather not be the weird outlier — to lie about small things instead of facing them.
If this cultura of lying expands, it starts to encompass bigger and bigger things.
For example, instead of lying about whether your stepmother’s garlic bread tastes good, now you’re lying about whether you think it’s a good idea for your coworker to be having a third beer at lunch. “Go for it!” you say in a slightly sarcastic tone, telling yourself the sarcastic tone is sufficient feedback to fulfill your duty in this scenario. After all, he’s only a coworker, you tell yourself, actively ignoring the other night when you told him you were his friend.
Now you’re lying to your coworker and lying to yourself about whether you’re lying to your coworker. The lying has expanded.
In any given society, a certain amount of lying is expected. As an autistic, I’ve had a hard time dealing with the fact that the optimal amount of lying might not be zero. But even if it’s not zero, it is very small. And if a society’s culture gets too unbalanced, away from facing things as they come up and toward lying to ignore them instead, then the society starts to degrade.
Then everyone’s perception of the society, as in the sum total of all their experiences interacting with others including those potential interactions they haven’t had yet, starts to skew in terms of the expectation that others will lie to them. Interactions become less valuable, because any given interaction could change out from under you. You can’t trust your neighbor when they say they’ll keep an eye on your yard. You can’t trust your boss when she says you can come to her with anything. You can’t trust your friends to give you honest feedback when you ask for it.
And that state of trust just makes it more tempting to lie. Why be vulnerable with the truth when the people around you are liars? Why trust your own sense that something is wrong if you, yourself, lie all the time?
And this particular psych prof says that the extreme end of that process, of the lies getting bigger and more frequent, in a network effect across a whole society, is genocide and other atrocity.
The lies cause people to check out and when people check out to a sufficient degree they can ignore a genocide, and when people can ignore a genocide, tell themselves there’s nothing they can do to stop it, is when genocide happens.
Sort of like how the human body is always being invaded by pathogens, all day every day. It’s only when the immune system fails to kill those pathogens immediately that an infection occurs.
In the same way, the genocidal impulse is always there, coming out of the darkest and nastiest parts of the human soul. But people’s ability to pay attention, convey and receive accurate information, and fix problems as they see them (which is a result of seeing them clearly enough to be moved to action by them), acts to weed out that impulse continually.
A culture of lying is like a breakdown of the signals used in the immune system. If the T-cells can’t recognize invaders they can’t eat them. A culture of truth-telling puts people into contact with what’s going on, in a way they can’t ignore. And that same culture of truth-telling makes people respect humanity and their own society, making it feel more worth defending from intentional evil, and from unconscious mistake-making and general breakdown.
It’s in you too, Pepsi, like the bubbles that trail up out of your depths. It’s only by keeping a meaningful life going that you prevent yourself from turning rotten and manifesting the evil that is inside you.
Post-pandemic, I started to value my privacy a little more, leading me to put up more of a wall of separation between my “public persona” and my real life. Not sure if this applies to others as well.
“Masking” is a thing neurodivergent people talk about a lot, but it’s comparable to comparing “normal clothes” and costumes or drag. There is no “normal.” When you get dressed for the day, you’re putting on a costume. Maybe it’s a business suit or a uniform, but maybe it’s just “your look” for the day.
The thing is that “you” don’t exist. There’s memory continuity of the consciousness that drives your body each day, but how you act to other people, the beliefs you have, and the clothes you wear are all part of a complex construction that you think of as yourself. But none of that is individually “you.” If you put on a costume, you would probably act different: you’d be “in-character” but you probably don’t think about this as being a different you, you still feel like yourself, just wearing a costume.
But if you changed your clothes, changed your interactions with others, changed your beliefs, then people would say “you’ve changed” as though you had shifted into a different person.
Everyone puts on masks for different groups of people. You wear a professional mask at work, an extrovert mask when out with friends, an intimate mask (which maybe feels like no mask at all) with family. Social media puts social pressure and often monetary pressure behind maintenance of a particular mask/identity. The fact that so many people are aware of the artiface of it is what you’re seeing.
It used to be that most people’s days were split up into a home period, a work period, a recreational period, etc. With the modern “always online, always available” world, our masks have become fluid and a constant part of us. Instead of putting on your work face in the morning and taking it off after a long day, you have to constantly be ready to break out the correct persona at any time, depending on who is contacting you on the phone. This leads to more “cracks” in the masks. People aren’t “more fake,” they’re revealing more of themselves than intended because the masks keep slipping. This doesn’t necessarily reveal any “true self” either because there is no such thing. Rather it let’s the common parts slip out more (most people hide a lot of their personal selves from work colleagues) and reveals the contradictions in the other parts that normally can embe kept seperate.
My wife works in a highschool and feels like you do, not so much fake but addicted and you have to put on a facade like if you are walking to class alone you should be on your phone pretending to be messaging someone or else you’ll feel awkward
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