#111: Erving Goffman, Instagram, and the Real You
You know all the advice about ignoring your inner critic, avoiding comparisons, and giving yourself credit for your achievements. But you can't shake the sense that the real you is something shameful, something you need to keep hidden at all costs, and that those people who say nice things about you would be horrified if they knew what you were really like.
Friend, you've got Real You all wrong. The fact that there are parts of you that you'd hate to share with others doesn't make you wrong, or an impostor, or shameful. According to the sociologist Erving Goffman, you're completely normal. Your Imperfectionist Godmother is here to help you make friends with your secret self - and to see that everyone else has one too.
Reference:
Goffman, Erving. 1956: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre).
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello again, imperfectionists. Something very strange happened to me last week. I completed a piece of work before the deadline. I don’t think this has happened since I was an undergraduate, when I submitted pretty much every piece of work earlier than the deadline. I really struggle to identify with that long-lost, alien version of Rebecca, but I suppose her excellent time management must have had something to do with the sometimes draconian penalties that students suffer when they submit work late. Student Rebecca definitely didn’t want her marks docked. Missing writing deadlines these days doesn’t usually come with penalties. As the philosopher John Perry remarked in his wonderful essay, Structured Procrastination (go and look that up if you haven’t read it, you won’t regret it) - the vast majority of academic tasks don’t actually have clear deadlines, despite everyone pretending otherwise.
Anyway, the uncharacteristically punctual piece of work that I finished last week was an essay for the online magazine, Aeon. It’s about awkward silences: why some silences are awkward while others are comfortable. It’s going to be published some time towards the end of June, I’m told. The reason I’m telling you this isn’t just to gloat about having met a deadline for once. It’s because, in the course of writing it, I drew on some insights about how we present ourselves to others from the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman - and it struck me that those insights would be great as the basis for a podcast episode.
So, let me set the scene. You know it’s a bad idea to compare yourself to others, right? I’ve talked about this a lot, and especially in episode #87: You’re overlooking your unique value. It’s a bad idea, but of course, we do it all the time, because … we sort of have to. A huge part of evaluating how we’re doing unavoidably involves comparing ourselves to others. If you’re on the job market, it helps to know how your CV compares to other people’s so that you can try to fill any gaps and make sure you stand out. Sometimes, it’s even reassuring to compare ourselves to others. John Perry gives an example of this in Structured Procrastination. He describes how, feeling guilty about being almost a year late with writing an essay for an edited volume, he wrote to the editor to apologise and promise to do better. When the editor responded, Perry tells us, ‘It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else.’ Great! Perry got to forget about the essay for a while, and to procrastinate with a relatively clear conscience. The caption to his author photo on his Structured Procrastination page reads, ‘Author practices jumping rope with seaweed while work awaits.’
While it’s true that, sometimes, comparing ourselves to others is sensible or even reassuring, it causes misery because so often we do it in a way that highlights our shortcomings in a misleading way. We focus on our own faults and other people’s merits, while overlooking our own merits and other people’s faults. You don’t need me to tell you this, of course - this message is ubiquitous. It’s there when we’re warned again and again about the dangers of expecting to live up to other people’s Instagram moments, and the peculiarly academic danger of comparing our first draft to other people’s publication-ready final draft. We all know about the dangers of comparing our insides with other people’s outsides - of telling ourselves that unless we, on our worst days, are like those we admire on their best days, we’re failing.
That’s all good advice, and I’m not here to dispute any of it. But there’s a problem with it, I think, which is what I want to focus on in this episode. Those sensible warnings against comparing ourselves to other people’s Instagram moments or final draft moments can ring a bit hollow, for many of us, because we all know that Instagram moments and final draft moments are fleeting, and most of the time we’re not comparing ourselves to things like that. Those aspirational snapshots of life that people share on social media or in their final drafts are exactly that: snapshots. While it’s sensible advice not to compare your own life to what other people show on Instagram or in their final drafts, implicit in that advice is often: because that’s not what people are like most of the time. The problem is that often, when we compare ourselves to others, we’re not comparing ourselves to those sorts of moments. As I describe this, my mind is going to a former colleague of mine whose work ethic I admired. This colleague would be there at their desk every day, Word document open, toiling away. No checking social media every few minutes. No getting up to make yet another drink or look out the window or do some other unnecessary task. Just sitting there quietly grinding it out, day in, day out. The contrast between this and my own approach to writing was shocking. I wished I had the focus and discipline of this colleague, but I couldn’t sustain it even for 30 minutes, let alone hours and days and weeks.
Now, it might be easy to dismiss someone’s Instagram moment as not real life, but I can’t dismiss my colleague’s approach to writing in this way. This really was how they worked. And there’s no punchline of this story where I reveal that it emerged later that this colleague was actually fast asleep in front of their screen, or was doing an ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ writing project like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, or was high the whole time. This colleague is successful, and deservedly so. I hear this sort of story a lot in coaching sessions: clients miserably making comparisons to people and situations that aren’t easy to dismiss as misleading or unreal. They say things like, ‘My colleague is able to say no to unreasonable requests, but I really struggle with that’ and ‘My colleague is willing to share their in-progress work with other people, but I’d be too embarrassed’. There’s no reason for me to doubt that their colleagues really are doing these things. And so, when clients like this hear advice along the lines of, ‘Don’t compare yourself unfavourably to other people because you’re actually mistaken about what they’re like,’ they just feel dejected, because they know their comparisons are not like that. That advice, they think, is for other people - people who really do hold their own in comparisons with others. It’s not for people like them: the minority who truly are rubbish. They are watching real life, and seeing the people they admire as they really are. Or so they think.
Here’s where I think it’s helpful to draw on Erving Goffman’s work. Goffman was interested in interpersonal interaction. His most influential work was a book, published in the 1950s, called The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life - which gives you a taste of what he was about. He argued that whenever we’re with other people, we’re constantly presenting ourselves a certain way. He used a theatrical analogy to describe this: whenever we’re in company, we’re playing a role, like an actor in a play. The role we play depends on the situation. At work, perhaps you’re The Diligent Employee or The Conscientious Teacher or The Confidante. When you’re with your family, you might be The Supportive Spouse or The Youngest Child or The Reliable One or The Smart Kid or The Scapegoat. Depending on which group of friends you’re with, perhaps you’re The Planner or The Joker or The Diplomat. You get the idea: basically, we’re on-stage when we’re around other people, and the role we’re playing depends on the situation, who we’re with, our history, our goals, and so on. But there’s a backstage version of ourselves too. It emerges when there’s nobody else around, when we can let down our guard and relax, free from thoughts about how we might be perceived. Occasionally we might allow trusted others to glimpse aspects of our backstage selves, but in general that part of us is not for public view, and it can be stressful when other people encounter it. You know that anxiety dream that people sometimes have, where they turn up for work wearing their pyjamas? Goffman’s framework helps explain why that would be stressful. Your jammies belong to your backstage self.
An important aspect of Goffman’s view is that the fact we play a role whenever we’re front-of-stage doesn’t make us insincere or dishonest. Playing a role is just part of what’s involved with interacting with others. You never get to see all of anyone else’s backstage self, and you never fully expose your backstage self to others. You might be ok with your best friend seeing you in your jim jams, but you probably wouldn’t want even them accompanying you to the toilet or reading your diary or eavesdropping on your session with your therapist.
This has implications for those comparisons you make between yourself and other people. It’s true that life isn’t made up of Instagram moments, but don’t take that to mean that in between the Instagram moments, you’re seeing the real person, if by ‘the real person’ you mean the person playing the role. You’re never that person. You’re only ever seeing a role. Whenever you compare yourself to someone else, you’re comparing yourself - specifically, your backstage self - with someone else’s role.
How is this helpful? Well, let’s revisit that comparison I described earlier, when I compared my own unreliable approach to writing with that of my diligent colleague. It’s true that my colleague’s writing ethic wasn’t unreal or staged or misleading. But I still wasn’t comparing like with like. I was comparing my colleague’s frontstage self with my backstage self. Were a third person to compare my colleague’s frontstage self with the frontstage version of myself that I presented at work, the contrast would be less striking. That third person would see my colleague sitting there writing, but they’d see me doing something pretty similar. They’d see that my colleague’s writing output was a lot bigger than mine, but so what? This colleague was known for churning it out. My output, while more modest, was still pretty good. People told me as much.
Let’s talk about that, shall we? People told me that I was doing well, but - like so many of you - I discounted this compliment because those people weren’t seeing the real me. They only saw the version of myself that I presented at work. If they knew what I was really like, they’d be horrified. I’d be out on my ear. But, if we take Goffman’s view seriously, it’s the same for everyone. Every time anyone receives a compliment, it’s based on their frontstage self. That’s all anyone sees. So, don’t go thinking that the compliments you get are somehow emptier than the ones other people get. It’s obvious, when you think about it. If your boss tells you that you’re doing well, what they mean is that they like the version of yourself that you’re presenting at work. True, they don’t know what you’re like when nobody’s looking. But unless you’re a serial killer on your days off, or doing something else truly awful, they don’t care. They don’t care if you slack off a bit when nobody’s looking - in fact, if they paused to think about it, they’d assume that’s what you do, because it’s what everyone does. All your boss cares about, when they compliment the version of yourself that they encounter at work, is that that version of you is doing okay.
There’s another aspect of Goffman’s view I want to talk about. This is what actually gave me the idea of talking about Goffman in a podcast episode. It started with a comment I made, in passing, in the last episode, my interview with Bethany Wilinski. I said that I used to think that the only acceptable way to conduct myself when I was working at home was as if my employer had CCTV installed in my home and was able to watch my every move. I really did think something like this, and it made every completely normal aspect of everyday life feel like a failure. If I stuck a load of laundry in the washing machine on a work-from-home day, my inner critic would quietly whisper to me that she’s never seen anyone else do that while they’re in the office. I can even remember, as a graduate student getting quite upset about the fact that I was fond of reading crappy magazines while I was relaxing. Surely, I wailed to a friend and fellow student, I wouldn’t want to do that if I was a real philosopher? All those academics who I desperately wanted to accept me were probably reading Kant as they lay on their sun loungers, if they lay on sun loungers at all, which they probably didn’t because I couldn’t imagine that taking sunny holidays were cerebral enough for them, and their days off probably looked exactly like their days on. Imagine how horrified they’d be if they saw me reading Cosmo articles about how to look seductive yet professional while negotiating a pay rise?
I think that what was going on here was that I’d simply failed to understand that people have backstage selves as well as frontstage selves. I only saw the frontstage versions of all those philosophers I looked up to, and it seemed unbelievable to me that they might be different when they weren’t philosophising. The fact that I was different when there weren’t any other philosophers around was, to me, evidence that I didn’t belong. I saw the existence of my own backstage self as a moral failing, as evidence that I was a fraud. But in fact, it’s completely normal. The fact that I never saw anyone else’s backstage self didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
Now, my conception of other philosophers that I’m describing here might seem incredible to you, but bear in mind that this was in the days before social media, when my only encounters with other academics involved either reading their stuff or seeing them while they were at work. Things are different now, when you can follow the scholars you admire on social media and see that they do normal things like going on holiday and taking bike rides and making friends with every cat they encounter. It’s easier now to get a sense of them as well-rounded people rather than as flesh-mortifying intellects. But don’t go thinking that you see their backstage selves this way. It’s all frontstage. Remember that, according to Goffman, we have different frontstage selves for different situations. If, while you’re comparing yourself unfavourably to other people, you’re ever tempted to think otherwise, try a little thought experiment. Ask yourself: if I were to walk in on this person while they were on the toilet, would I expect them to be comfortable with that? Unless you’re that person’s cat, the answer is going to be: no. What that tells you is, first, that they have a backstage self, and second, that they’re not sharing it with you.
That’s it from me this time. Rebecca the Podcaster is about to disengage, and I’m going to go off and do some backstage stuff. What sort of backstage stuff? Well, if I were to tell you, it wouldn’t be backstage stuff, would it? Next time, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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