Inauthenticity

It’s funny. My post yesterday received zero toasts. The one before that also received zero toasts. I didn’t start writing in order to see how many toasts I got but it’s an interesting piece of information to learn that toasts have become something I think about. And by think about, I don’t mean agonize over or even spend more than a cursory, passing thought about them but one must wonder what kind of effect that has on what I write.

Sartre wrote of bad faith and being inauthentic. Being inauthentic, living a life in bad faith, is living a life not of your own choosing. It is ridiculously hard, perhaps even impossible, to live an authentic life because trying to suss out what is your own decision—100% pure, not predicated or altered by any input whatsoever—is nigh unachievable. It’s hard to separate what is ours and what was given to us (or worse yet, foisted upon us by a cruel, unforgiving, unfeeling world).

So every input into one’s life must be examined. It must be accepted or rejected. Are you going to make this a part of who you are? In choosing, we choose our lives. In choosing, we are showing others what is acceptable and not. In choosing, we must be aware that we are making the wider world into a certain way. It isn’t wise or good to choose something that impedes upon another.

I only bring up Sartre because he is on my mind (philosophy exam tomorrow and I’ve been studying) and I can see the real world implication of his philosophy. Do the toasts alter the content I write?