— Jia TolentinoIn every human interaction, he wrote in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a person must put on a sort of performance, create an impression for an audience. The performance might be calculated, as with the man at a job interview who’s practiced every answer; it might be unconscious, as with the man who’s gone on so many interviews that he naturally performs as expected; it might be automatic, as with the man who creates the correct impression primarily because he is an upper-middle-class white man with an MBA.
Replicated under Fair Use from Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino.