I know it sounds flippant but⊠certain things are fundamentally performative.  And other things are so close as makes no difference.
Kindness is performative. Â Actions are kind, and people are kind by performing those actions. Â You canât âpretendâ to be kinder than you are, you can only perform kindness or not perform kindness, and choosing to perform kindness is always worthwhile, no matter how much you may second-guess your motivations.
Strength is so many things. Â It takes strength to pretend a strength you donât feel. Â And the way to achieve strength is to exercise it, so long as you do it in enough moderation to not strain or break anything. Â Being able to affect strength when necessary while being able to put it down again when that in turn is necessary is healthy. Â Everyone starts weight training with the littlest weights. Â Itâs not fake or pretending to do what you gotta do in any given situation.
Funniness lives in the interlocutor, not in the speaker.  It doesnât matter how funny you think you are (or think you are pretending to be) - thatâs not how itâs measured.  At what point are you âpretendingâ to be a musician if the music still gets made?  And often what itâs tempting to describe in first person as âpretendingâ is more accurately described in the third person as âpracticingâ - which is of course the way you cause things to Be.
Sociability is also performative.  Pretending to be sociable is justâŠbeing sociable, despite a disinclination towards it.  Itâs making an effort towards something you value.  So long as the effort is not so great that it backfires into resentment, thereâs no practical difference. Â
Qualities or activities or whatever are no less worthy because you have to actively choose to perform them.  If anything, the worthiness lies in the act of choosing.  Itâs not âpretendingâ - itâs agency.
tl;dr: ainât nothing wrong with âfake it till you make it.â  A plastic spoon* holds just as much soup as a ârealâ one
* I keep wanting to talk about semantic domains!  Artifacts are defined by their utility, whereas living things are defined by their identity.  So plastic forks are still forks, but plastic flowers arenât flowers.  So thereâs two pep-talk messages to take away from this: (1) for certain things, the distinction between âfakeâ and ârealâ isnât a relevant one so long as they still get the job done, and (2) the purpose of a living thing is to be the thing that it is.  The idea of a âuseless personâ is as semantically nonsensical as the idea of âpretend kindnessâ (or fake cutlery).
