Amid the onslaught of mass marketing and the prevalence of social norms, authenticity gets misplaced, perhaps at times forgotten altogether. To us this is everyday life, not a thing worthy of critical questioning or exploration. It’s the way things are. But the Situationists would have us believe otherwise.

Lead by Guy Debord and captured in his book The Society of Spectacle, Situationists often used the term “kidnapped” to describe our lives as media creations. Instead of having real-life experiences, our lives have become a spectacle in which authentic experiences have been substituted for pre-packed ideas and experiences. Authenticity has taken a back seat to commodity consumption and hype. To react against society’s prevailing ethic of consumer culture the Situationists advocated for acts of spontaneous defiance towards established order to create truth and tear away the veil of representation that had come to take the place of real experiences.

Situationists believed that each day we come to a fork in the road. We have the chance to act as we normally would, reflexively acting or doing what we think we should, or we have the chance to do something a bit different, a bit risky, a bit wild, but genuine. The spectacle appears as an illusion of unlimited choice but is actually a reduction of reality to pre-selected experiences- tv shows, websites, social norms- in which our leisure hours are kidnapped by programmed entertainment or acceptable activities.

To break the cycle of the spectacle, to take back the show and attain freedom, Debord wrote about dérive and détournement; through these two things he suggested that everyone could create their own reality, daily life, and situations. The dérive, meaning “to drift”, is described as “locomotion without a goal”, an act that could become a model for playful creation and a new way of life. A dériviste would be a drifter, someone who wanders (perhaps actually or through groups in society) living above and beyond social norms, challenging what it means to ‘live well’ and largely questioning society’s restrictive definition of happiness itself.

A détournement, according to Debord, was a means to turn the spectacle against itself, to reclaim reality and make it reflect personal creations rather than reality created by the spectacle. The point of détournement  was to “devalue the currency of the spectacle”; things we know today as “culture jamming” embody modern daydétournement though it can also exist on an smaller level, incited by an individual or a small group of people. Graffiti, spoken word, singing aloud, whistling, writing poetry, all the things you don’t see people do anymore that were expressions of authenticity and genuineness, are all small forms of détournement.

The Situationists came before all the New-agers saying it first: we create our own reality. Both of these groups tell us that we have to be awake enough to realize that we are both actors and creators of our lives. The problem, the insidious secret of the spectacle, is that most of the time it does not even occur to us to question anything. Our reality and our choices are fed to us pre-packaged, shiny and new. Instead of creating our own show, perhaps we are living in one that is scripted for us.

So often we forget that we have power, we have agency, we have the ability to create our experience, to figure out what we truly want. However, active creation and knowing our purpose would require a deeper questioning of what is. What is right, what is happy, what is comfortable. Often times these answers are different for each of us but to find out we would have to wake up, question what we “know” and then listen carefully for the answer.

And also, pineapples.