Transparency is the degree to which other people think we’re telling the truth. Being transparent means that others can see into us as if we were a pane of glass.
Authenticity is the degree to which people think we are being ourselves. Authenticity may come easier to older adults because we have far less to lose by being ourselves, warts and all.
Not exactly the same concepts, and not exactly a frequent topic of aging, but I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers and I’d like to think more about these concepts with you. Gladwell writes that we make three mistakes when talking to strangers:
- We assume (often wrongly) that strangers are telling us the truth. Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, thought in his initial meetings with Adolf Hitler, that he was telling Chamberlain the truth when Hitler said he wasn’t interested in starting a war. Psychologist Researcher Tim Levine calls this defaulting to truth.
- We assume that if the person we’re talking to seems nervous or uncomfortable in some visible way that they are NOT being transparent, that they are hiding something. Sometimes this is just a person being her nervous or wacky self — being authentic.
- We assume that if the suicide rate among British women skyrocketed in the early 60s (as it did), there was something about being British or being a woman that was particularly dangerous during those years. It turns out that there was a form of gas used in many British ovens at the time, making suicide extremely easy. The kind of gas that was widely used facilitated painless suicide. When the kind of gas was changed, the suicide rate went down by half. The only relationship in this case between women and suicide is that women most often choose a non-violent way to kill themselves — pills, carbon monoxide — whereas men most often choose guns. The type of gas used and the women who killed themselves were “coupled.” One determined the other. When the type of gas was replaced with a far less lethal type, far fewer women killed themselves.
I like to think of myself as both transparent and authentic. You may shake your head, and rightfully respond that I can afford both of these adjectives because of my privilege, and you’d be right. You might also say that because I’m old (both a privilege and a liability depending on who you are, and what you believe about aging), I can, at least, afford authenticity . I have applied for several jobs in the last five years and I have not needed to put a spin on my credentials or my personality. One was to work in a women’s clothing store. I made the mistake of asking, “If there are no customers in the store, may I knit?” The owner looked horrified. I teetered on the edge of employment, not knowing that I would be expected to send emails, steam clothes, solicit customers by phone and vacuum. I was NOT expected to knit. I worked there for five years until I had other, more challenging things to do. While I loved clothes, I hadn’t worked in retail since I was 17 and didn’t know the protocols of marketing rather than knitting. (To tell the truth, I did knit once or twice, but only when the owners weren’t there, and only when there were no customers in the store.)
Transparency is a little bit more complicated. I have paid work and I volunteer within a very large and very complex academic institution. I have bosses, or more correctly, people with whom I need to check before I do most things. This isn’t difficult or painful. It doesn’t hurt my ego. But I do need to remember to check, and to keep my thoughts to myself at least some of the time. I need to be willing to restructure a class or modify a presentation due to the prevailing winds of the university and the department. Sometimes I just answer an email and then get a message from one of those with whom I should have checked requesting me to hold off next time. On only one occasion did I have to go back to someone I’d invited to present and say we’d changed directions. That person was very gracious. I really didn’t like doing it. So when I say that I’m transparent, I should probably say that I want to be and that I try to be. I’m not always successful.
