Performative

Essays

Oct 23

I used to perform for my Nana when I was very little. I remember hiding behind her plastic-covered couches and popping up to do a skit about nothing. She would laugh and laugh, even after the stroke that left her unable to speak more than a mumble. She had one of those electric chairs that would take her from the bottom of the stairs to the top, and for every person who ever wanted to ride one of those to see if they were as cool as they looked - they were.

She once gave me a hundred-dollar bill after one of my Bad News Bears skits, and my mom and grandma put the kibosh on it, much to her dismay. They thought she didn’t know what she was doing and that she was “tipping” me too much. I thought I had just crushed my role as Tanner Boyle, playing shortstop and spitting in the ground before making a diving catch. Later, she would slip me some candy when no one was looking.

I know why I was being performative, but it’s harder to fathom why everyone else is. Performative vulnerability has become a trending content strategy that is far beyond sad, falling somewhere between illogical and tragic. I lay my vulnerability out in lost pages of a back channel, hoping that one person who reads it feels like they can do the same. The world does it for tiny hearts in the upper right corner of an app built to ruin their lives.

I saw You Can See Everything with my son yesterday afternoon. We love Nathan Fielder, and this film was epic, but it left me pondering performance. What was a performance and what wasn’t? With Fielder, it’s always hard to tell, but with Elizabeth Holmes and her husband, it became a jigsaw puzzle with no edge pieces. Then, as you volley your thoughts back and forth, Amanda Seyfried steps into the narrative and jumbles your ideas with a loud smack on the table. You leave wondering what an actor or actress is.

When I do a public speaking engagement, I turn on a part of myself. Same when I make videos. I am the one-take king because I don’t care about the result. Barring me sharting myself, the narration will be fine. But when I'm in this mode, there is a sense of performance. It’s the same performative acuity that helped me do 250 jury trials. The switch flips, but the other side of that switch is staying in bed all day watching cat videos.

Kids are inherently performative, especially when it comes to their toddler manipulation techniques. You can see the wheels turning when a kid really wants something and thinks they have unlocked the secret to get it. They will do 81 chores. They will go to bed on time every night for a year. It’s not real; it’s a performance. They are tiny actors playing the role of someone who can fairly negotiate. It can be quite impressive.

Sometimes, when I am hosting an in-person real estate investing meetup, I can see a version of myself from the outside, and he is turned up. It’s me, but a mildly hyped version. An introvert with a temporary emotional jet pack. I watch the video back and see myself as Jonathan-adjacent, the Jonathan who has to change to handle the world's communicative onslaught.