Bad faith

Picture a waiter. They appear to engage well with you. They have a big smile on their face. They ask you questions and are attentive to your answers and your general needs. Yet there’s something not quite right about their presence. Maybe they’re a little too obsequious, a little too full-on with you. Then it dawns on you that they’re not being real. They don’t care about you at all. Instead, they’re putting on an act. But it isn’t personal – they just hate their job and faking it is the only way they can get through the day. They know that there’s so much more to them than being a waiter. At this very moment in time, they could do anything. They could sing a lovely song. They could walk away and never come back. They could start a new job somewhere else. But they don’t because they’re fearful of change, fearful of what might happen if they leave. And the fact that they have so much freedom to make choices terrifies them into inertia, into doing nothing at all. And they know this. And they resent this. And this is called bad faith (otherwise known as self-deception).

Existential philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre came up with this notion. Each of us is free to make a million and one choices, yet we don’t. Instead, we kid ourselves that we don’t have a choice, that we need to stay in a job (to pay the rent) or we need to stay in a relationship (for the sake of the children). Yet at some level we all know that this is bullshit. We stay, stuck in a rut, because we’re scared of the vast freedom and choices we have; and this is how many, many people can exist in a long-term state of distress and paralysis.

Sartre went as far as to say that “Human reality is what is not”, owing to the large numbers of people not wanting to be what they are. He also acknowledged the paradox of people having the freedom to choose not to have freedom.

Have you trapped yourself in a role that you, ultimately, do not want to play? If so, can you describe what this is/was like?

Can you make a list of all the things you could be doing now instead of the thing that you are doing?

How liberated would you say you are?