The Performative Self

How an addiction to performance is unsettling our society

Photo by Jorge Gordo on Unsplash

A number of pieces have been falling in place for me surrounding the idea of the performative self as not just a defining experience of contemporary life, but a defining social and personal vice. A couple of weeks ago

Chuck DeGroat

described to me the “performative turn in therapeutic culture” in response to this article about the rise of online mental health influencers. I found that to be an apt description of what I’m seeing as well. I’ve written about it in terms of “expressive individualism,” which I still think is right, but the focus is on performance for a public. I’m not sure how DeGroat would describe it, but in my mind this performative turn can look like 67% of GenZ men and 72% of GenZ women believing that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” That’s just one example. There are a million ways of performing your mental health challenges. My point is that this appears to be a trend, and it gets in the way of actual recovery by creating perverse incentives to hold onto your condition.

Then I’m reading A Time to Build by

Yuval Levin

and I read him describe some of the problems facing our political institutions, and one of the most pressing problems he identifies is performative politics. As Congress sees itself constantly before the gaze of the camera, it acts performatively instead of deliberately. Levin writes:

Their incentives are rooted in that understanding of our politics and not really in legislating. They remain intensely ambitious, as politicians always are, but their ambition is for a prominent role in the cultural theater of our national politics, and they view the institution of Congress as a particularly prominent stage in that theater—a way to raise their profiles, to become stars in the world of cable news or talk radio, to build bigger social media followings, and to establish themselves as celebrities. (48-49)

The same is true for our judges and our president. Everyone is performing. Everyone is hyper-aware of the gaze of the audience and is acting for them. But they aren’t playing a role. Not a different role, at least. That’s the interesting part. Not a role in the traditional sense of a “father” or “Senator” or “leader.” We’re all playing the same role: the lead character. And my suspicion is that this “main character energy”-syndrome infects all aspects of our culture.