on performing your life for the public in mind
Milan Kundera was right; we're all just performing our own existence
“The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies…”
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Although I - much to the surprise of many around me - wasn’t as struck by The Unbearable Lightness of Being as I had expected to be, a few sentences lingered for a long time after I finished the last page.
The one about keeping a public in mind struck me the most.
If you’re as much on social platforms as I am, you will eventually stumble across memes like these;
Glimpses of our everyday performative acts—some exaggerated, some painfully accurate—all wrapped in a self-referential humor that reassures us we’re not alone in our contradictions.
Reading Kundera’s words for the first time, I realized just how often I carry this imagined audience with me, shaping even the smallest moments of my life. Not just in the public sphere or during my many daily hours on social media where every act is, in fact, entirely performative), but also when I am completely by myself.
I used to see reading as one of those acts I would do purely for myself - a private act, untouched by the gaze of others. But even reading has become a kind of performance, a way of curating a persona, signaling not just who I am, but more likely who I wish to be perceived as. I particularly pick out the books that receive the prestigious, visible spot on my bedside table before having guests over. The fact that one book is more aesthetically pleasing than another makes me a lot more likely to pick it as my next read. Even the act itself takes on a performative quality: the artful placement of a book on a café table, the subtle awareness of how I must look while reading, as if viewed through the eyes of a passing stranger.
And so, I wonder - if even literature, the one thing that I’ve always held as my own to enjoy, becomes performative, what aspects of my life aren’t? I mean, I dress as the type of woman, I wish to be perceived as. I mimic the phrases of people I perceive as interesting or intellectual. Is Kundera right? Am I, in fact, just living a lie?
Like any other woman in her twenties, I do have a selection of rituals I tell myself are just for me. At night, I light a scented candle, clean my skin, and make a cup of sweet caramel tea. I do it out of habit, with a sense of ease and calm I rarely find elsewhere in my day. —although it makes me feel physically and mentally good, it also satisfies my desire to become the kind of woman who does these things. Like I am, once again, performing the role of someone I aspire to be
I suppose that this essay less an argument and more a stream of thoughts. I don’t have solutions—perhaps no one does. Maybe Kundera himself never moved far beyond the assertion that we live with the public in mind, and (as far as I know) he never concluded how to avoid it.
But if I must accept that I am performing a large part of my life—sometimes for an audience, sometimes just for myself—I can at least attempt to understand why. To that end, I’ve just started reading the selected works of René Girard, the French philosopher behind the concept of mimetic desire (the idea that our wants are not inherently our own but shaped by imitating the desires of others).
i think part of the reason we live in performance is to fulfil our desire to be known, seen, and understood. i think a lot of us share, exaggerate, and display certain interests as a way to let people see who we are on the inside, as if it’s a call to connection. we feel like we are a certain way, but how do we show it to others so that they know it too? how will we display ourselves to ensure that someone else stumbles across us and perceives us in the way we want to be known? and when we are finally seen and accepted through our performances, will they love us and see all of the goodness we know we have inside?
Who doesnt have a Persona? Jung was so right.