Our love of authenticity rises as all the world became a stage

We hustle for our worthiness by slipping on the emotional and behavioral straitjacket of cool and posturing as the tragically hip and the terminally “better than.” Being “in control” isn’t always about the desire to manipulate situations, but often it’s about the need to manage perception. We want to be able to control what other people think about

The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.

Yet appearing authentic while conforming to external values produces for the self-creating self an endlessly contradictory task of reconciling incommensurable values. How does this self, caught between a newly expanded sense of interiority and faced with an increased demand that it shape itself for the marketplace, render itself “authentic”?

We live in a world of personas constantly trying to project the image that we are stable, unafraid, and “have it together.” We share this currency of persona among one another, constantly reconvincing ourselves that it is what is real about us.