Coffee and Deep Conversations
Details
They say you should just be yourself... Nobody ever tells you which one.
This time we're looking at authenticity. It might be the last piece of advice anybody questions. You can push back on ambition, on politeness, even on the pursuit of happiness, and people will listen. Say something skeptical about "being real" and watch the room get uncomfortable.
That discomfort is probably worth exploring.
Because "be yourself" rests on some big assumptions that almost never get examined. That there's a true self somewhere underneath, waiting to be found. That the unfiltered version of you is the honest one. That expressing it is always a good thing.
And in practice, the ideal covers for a lot. The friend whose brutal honesty is mostly just brutal. The person who walks away from their commitments and calls it becoming who they really are. The influencer whose raw, unfiltered morning post took three takes. Strangest of all is an assumption I suspect sits behind our cultural obsession with true crime, conspiracy, and even the newer idea of "virtue signaling": that your worst impulse is the real you, while your kindness and consideration are just a mask.
So, this time we're asking questions like:
Is the true self something we discover, or something we invent?
Why does "I'm just being myself" so often show up right after someone got hurt?
Who gets praised as refreshingly direct, and who gets called difficult for saying the same thing?
And one more, saved for the end because it's about us: this group is built on saying what you actually think. Is that the real thing, or a very good performance of it?
No conclusions, no verdicts. Just an evening of pulling on threads most of us have never thought to pull.
Come as you are. Whoever that turns out to be ;)
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