[dkarl]

It's a very specific form of authenticity. It's the authenticity of people who don't make an effort, who don't feel any need to try, who know that people are going to accept them and look up to them no matter how shitty they are.

But for regular people it's a fantasy. Because it only works if you're rich.

[robocat]

What a weird viewpoint.

> But for regular people it's a fantasy

So for authentic people it's a fantasy???

I can only imagine that either

(a) you struggle to differentiate fake authenticity from authentic fakeness

or (b) perhaps you don't have enough authentic non-wealthy acquaintances.

Some welloff people countersignal successfully. But many don't because status signaling is difficult (evolutionarily).

> it only works if you're rich

And you imply that you think that people look up to the rich - however many people don't - perhaps that says something about your own pretensions?

Disclaimer: I'm a well off geek - definitely not rich and I'm rather poor at recognizing or playing status games.

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

> fake authenticity from authentic fakeness

I'm curious what you mean by these, I have an idea but I don't want to misconstrue you.

[dkarl]

I think you're confusing authenticity with DGAF, because they both look like the opposite of insecurity.

Trump and Hilton play a DGAF role on TV, but the very fact that they're putting in the effort means that it isn't authentically them. If they really didn't care, we wouldn't know their names, because being wealthy doesn't automatically make you a celebrity. Consider Michael Bloomberg, who briefly flirted with a presidential run, but then discovered that coming from legit middle class roots and achieving orders of magnitude more wealth than Donald Trump meant very little next to the decades of work Trump had put in to build his celebrity status.

As celebrities, they have embraced caring about what people as their job, and for them, part of that job is playing out the ordinary person's fantasy of not having to care what people think -- a role that is only authentically them in the sense that they learned it authentically as spoiled rich children.

A lot of people experience anxiety in their everyday lives over how other people will perceive them. "Did I do a good enough job? What are people saying about me? What do people actually think about me?" When Trump and Hilton ostentatiously act out being able to be dumb and inept and still being treated like they're amazing, it's the perfect inverse of what causes ordinary people anxiety, which makes it a perfect fantasy.

[potato3732842]

>It's the authenticity of people who don't make an effort, who don't feel any need to try, who know that people are going to accept them and look up to them no matter how shitty they are.

Or they know other people won't accept them regardless and they don't care.

It's one of those communication patterns you see at the top and the bottom and if your life consists of working in an office, living in a condo and golfing on the weekends you'll basically never run across anyone that does it.

[dkarl]

Pretending not to care what other people think is the least authentic thing imaginable. Everyone knows that the people obsess about not giving a fuck are the people who are deeply unhappy with how they're perceived and are fantasizing about a fix.

For secure people, caring what other people think doesn't have to mean being neurotic and miserable about it. It doesn't mean being so cringe that you lose people's respect.

Imagine caring what other people think and not being miserable because of it.

Imagine caring what other people think, and they respect you more for it instead of less.

Top performers care deeply about the opinions of people who matter. CEOs in particular obsess about it. If a CEO acted like your opinion didn't matter, they were probably right, and they were probably too busy thinking about the board and the COO who was angling for an eventual interim job to give you the time of day.

Plenty of documentaries about sporting legends who collected slights and obsessed over proving themselves every day. They cared, and it fueled them.

Trump and Paris Hilton are playing a part for a mass audience who don't know how elites act because they don't know any. Nobody is suggesting that Trump and Paris Hilton don't actually personally care. If they really didn't care, they wouldn't put in the effort. In the years when Paris Hilton was shooting reality shows, she was working a hell of a lot harder than a society heiress needs to. Trump had to keep a president's schedule (a version of it, at least) for four years and came back for more because he wanted to prove he could win again. Being on TV and running for public office are the ultimate forms of caring what other people think. I think the part they play is a part they learned by living it, and is authentic in that sense, but if it was really who they were, instead of being something they act out because they know the masses are impressed by it, we wouldn't know their names.

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

That isn't true in my experience. Authenticity doesn't require wealth in order to land.