Maybe this makes me a bastard, but I do it as a hobby when I meet strangers in the park. I try to see what I can get them to believe.
I like to think of it as “meeting people where they are.” As a home health nurse, I usually have my patient’s respect up front so I don’t have to impress them with how important (
lol) I am, I need to get them to feel comfortable with me. This is so they will tell me what is going on, where it hurts, and what they need to learn about. I have learned to read people pretty quickly and try to match them in speech patterns, dialect and vocabulary. In essence, I give them the impression I am just like them (“Folks is folks”) except with a bit more education. I speak in an entirely different way to patients with more education, such as the retired dentist I care for. It’s not like I am faking either way of speaking, it’s just which aspects of my personality I choose to express.
I had one late class at college where I regularly found myself waiting for a bus at the same stop as several drunks. Same crowd every week.
To get them to leave me alone about the third week or so I turned to them and signed a few choice words. They assumed I was deaf and stopped bothering me.
I work at a Catholic organization and I did not go out of my way to tell people I am a Buddhist atheist. They found out eventually though, and they think it’s great. They’re pretty awesome.
You’re probably the most stimulating conversationalist they will meet that day. I enjoy speaking to people when their backstory is weird, makes for a fun chat and maybe will be a good anecdote later.
I guess part of what bothers is that so often folk don’t appear to be interested in meeting ME where I am. Bugs me a little when discretion has me sit silent as folk say things I think very ugly and/or stupid. And a realtionship - however casual - is not exactly equal when only one party feels free to express their opinions.
Yeah, I know that is life…
This is an important aspect that I find too. I refer to it as the “predominant culture”. So, if one wants to get along, not only does one attempt to fit-in with people individually, but one must also be cognizant of what role one would play in the predominant culture. (It’s not always about fitting-in altogether, but fitting the role available to you. Some things you can’t change about yourself so your behavior options are limited. If you are the only guy among a group of women, you can’t really expect to fit-in as another woman…) So, you might consider taking on the role of Mr. Fancy Pants Lawyer Who Is Not A Racist and still be part of the group. Sure, you would probably have to suffer some low brow ribbing, but then you could be more yourself.
In all fairness, it’s pretty damn hard to meet someone where they are when they deliberately conceal where they actually are. If someone expresses some sort of assumption about you that’s not so, and you do absolutely nothing to challenge that assumption, you don’t then get to bitch because they act as though their original assumption is true. They have no way to know it’s not true if you won’t open your mouth.
And yeah, you’re totally insulting these folks and being a complete jackass by assuming they’ll treat you badly because of your income. Unfortunately, now that you’ve been all evasive and quasi-deceitful about the subject, there’s not really any way for your job to come out without the insulting assumptions also coming out. It’s not really the way to make friends and influence people, iyswim.
As for there being lots of God-fearing folk in them hills and hollers, for the love of all that’s holy don’t say shit like that. It sounds really snobby and condescending, especially to people who have spent generations being portrayed as nothing but slack-jawed yokels and are heartily sick of being looked down because of their home and heritage. Besides, pretty much all of the bluegrass and old-time players I know are associated with Appalshop and are total hippies. Hippies who live in, as you say, them hills and hollers.
I’m going cell phone shopping with my sister this weekend. I have to be a bit careful what I say, because I don’t want the people at the store to know that I work for a cell phone manufacturer.
(“Well, we had a guy from ____ in here, and he said that phones by ____ had a problem…”)
I don’t lie about it…but I definitely withhold information.
I’ve spent over a quarter-century programming navigation systems, guidance systems and avionics displays. I’ve worked with almost every OS you’ve heard of and quite a few that you haven’t.
I never say a word about this when shopping for PC stuff at Best Buy. I want to know just how much the staff is willing to bullshit me.
To their credit, it rarely happens.
The other night I was at a bar. A representative from Great Lakes Brewing was doing a sampling. He eventually packed up to leave, and I (consummate brown-nose) helped him carry his gear to his van.
He realized he still had the bag of bottle opener key rings he had meant to give away, and he asked me to hand them out. So I walked around the bar and occasionally surreptitiously put a hand in my pocket, approached someone and whispered, “hey, here’s a lil sumpin, but don’t let anyone know”, palming the freebie to them and body-blocking anyone’s view.
A few people noticed my discrete exchanges. I noticed a couple of hushed conversations and nods in my direction. My appearance can fit “drug dealer” I guess. It was fun.
Hope you don’t mind my edit. It is easy to meet folk in al kinds of situations, but you are correct if you intended to suggest that deliberate concealmentgenerally interferes with really getting to know someone. But I guess my position is that I’m far more interested in making music with these folk - and getting along with them, than expressing my true inner nature. Really not interested in making friends with or influencing these people. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to be “friendly” with them.
Your experiences must have been quite different than mine, if you have found conservative religious groups to be tremendously welcoming of liberal atheists. At a recent festival we were discussing Bela Fleck, and I was a tad surprised at the disdain with which one guy asked, “Isn’t he a HUMANIST?” This followed another guy’s lengthy - and uninformed - diatribe againse Obamacare. But damn, these guys can pick!
And, in all honesty, I suspect it goes both ways. The Humanist group I used to frequent was not particularly interested in wecoming bible-thumpers. As the new guy, I mainly want to fit in with little notice other than my (modest) musicianship and dashing good looks.
All the time, but I don’t consider it misrepresenting myself, I consider it playing to the audience.
I don’t socialise with people at work, I behave and speak very differently in the boardroom than I do in a normal work situation or a social situation. I adapt to the people and the situation and adjust accordingly.
I know who I am, but very few others do.
Every weekday, every week, every month throughout the year.
Not just me, but my coworkers as well.
The problem, really, is that we have one guy who spends most of his time wandering around sharing his views on life and, when he’s sharing his views, he’s the type of person who just KNOWs absolutely everything because he’s got the confidence to tell us how things are – vaccinations cause brain damage, those people are gaming the system to steal billions in redistributed tax dollars (welfare, medical aid, etc.), WMD’s are still in Iraq waiting to be found, modern societies cannot exist without civilian gun ownership, etcetera.* The rest of us have stopped even thinking of engaging in conversations with him, not because he’s wrong but because arguing is futile and not because he’s right because agreeing is encouraging to him. We simply nod and smile or present a glassy-eyed stare when, for instance, he turns a discussion of the morning’s traffic jam into a sermon about Second Amendment obligations. Over time it seems that our lack-of-opposition has led him to believe he’s simply right about everything he claims. Even when he’s wrong about a technical issue that is supposed to be within his field of expertise, he’ll ‘ammend’ his earlier diagnoses with an ‘I knew it all along’ attitude. We’ve given up, and his distributionist, misogynist, Bible-literalist, closed-mindedness continues unabated.
The main reasons we don’t get rid of him are that he really does a phenomenal job at doing his job – when he’s doing his job – and he brings in surplus fish from his weekend dives and gives them to the boss and execs.
*I overheard him telling a coworker that science is evil because it’s a product of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which was originally forbidden. Really? You’re a network engineer! Do you think all these computers would exist without science?
–G!
Don’t try to teach a pig to sing.
It’s a waste of time.
And it annoys the pig.
From early college (18) until finally losing my virginity at age 26, yes, I did a LOT of that.
I spent a few months living with ‘Animal Liberation’ PETA type vegans. I didn’t realise this when I moved in, but my housemate would actually assault people for such terrible crimes as eating meat, or ‘imprisoning’ animals -well, it was fine when she left her dogs shut in and going crazy for a few days because she couldn’t be arsed to walk them, but that was because it was her doing it, and she was vegan, but anyone else was automatically evil for having a pet.
My family run a zoo. I worked there for years.
Damn right I misrepresented myself 
See, I consider myself probably overly honest and authentic, but even I can’t figure out how that is possible. At least, not as the OP defined misrepresentation, which includes consciously withholding parts of your personality.
And, yes, I know you are an anarchist. I still don’t see how you can do it. That would seem far more limiting than bad faith.
I tend to act a lot more like a hick depending on who I’m around. When I’m with my family or somewhere in town or at church for example, my accent fades and I use much better grammar. When I’m at work, I sound like a redneck, use terrible grammar, spit on the ground, and so on…just like everybody else. It’s like I have several different modes.
When people ask me what I do, I don’t tell them I’m a lawyer, I tell them that I play piano in a whorehouse. Really. I don’t want people to despise me right off the bat because of my profession, I want them to get to know me for who I am first.
Yes.
I don’t think I know it all–or that I even know a lot. But I hate coming across as a know-it-all. Sometimes I long to be more cool than “nerd”. So I will keep quiet when people are saying inaccurate statements and I will ask questions that I already know the answers to. When people ask for my opinion about stuff, I’ll just shrug and say, “I haven’t thought about it that much.” Even though I have. I sometimes slip up and reveal my “true” self. But I always feel ashamed afterwards.
I have a naturally deep timbre to my voice. Sometimes it sounds almost masculine and robotic to my ears. Sometimes I catch myself raising the pitch of my voice and putting extra inflections in it, just to sound like everyone else.
Sometimes I flat-out lie about my likes and dislikes. Just so I can fit in better.
I wish I could be more natural and not hung-up on myself.