Authenticity Through The Ages:

A Brief History of Being Real

Later in life than I care to admit, I learned what reading and therapy have in common.

Both have been huge parts of my life since I was young. Both have given me incredibly meaningful insights into myself, other people, and the world around me. And both have only taken me so far when it comes to aligning the world inside me with the one I’m living every day.

I can tell you about my attachment style, my Enneagram type, and the exact moment in childhood when I learned to people-please. I’ve read the books, done the exercises, had the revelations. But ask me what I’m doing differently on a random Tuesday afternoon? That’s where things get fuzzy.

Authenticity is kind of like that. We all value it. We all want it. But most of us would struggle to define it succinctly, let alone practice it when it feels risky or when we’re tired and it’s 3pm and we have six more emails to answer.

Fortunately for us, we’re not the first people to be confused about this. Smart people have been confidently contradicting each other about what authenticity means for literally thousands of years. Which is both reassuring and deeply unhelpful.

So welcome to the first post of Everyday Authenticity, where we’re going to stop analyzing what it means to be ourselves and start actually experimenting with it. But first, let me take you on a quick tour through history to show you exactly why this whole thing is so confusing in the first place.

Ancient Greece: Know Thyself (But Like, How Though?)

Let’s start with the original authenticity influencer: Socrates. This guy walked around Athens bothering people with questions and famously declared that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Cool, Socrates. Very inspiring. But also extremely vague about what you’re supposed to do with all that examining.

The Greeks gave us “know thyself” as if self-knowledge were the whole game. And sure, it’s important. But here’s what they didn’t mention: you can know yourself intimately, catalog every quirk and tendency, and still spend your days pretending to be someone else because it feels safer or more acceptable or just easier.

Self-knowledge turns out to be necessary but wildly insufficient.

The Enlightenment: Blame Society, Yearn for Nature

Fast forward to the 1700s, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau shows up to tell everyone that we’re all naturally good and authentic, but society ruins us. According to him, your authentic self is the one that existed before culture got its grubby hands on you.

This perspective is seductive. It suggests there’s some pure, uncorrupted version of you buried under all the social conditioning, just waiting to be excavated. And while that’s poetic, it’s also not particularly actionable. What are you supposed to do, reject all social influence and live alone in the woods? (Wait, that doesn’t actually sound terrible right about now...)

The tension he identified is real, though: the version of ourselves we present for approval versus who we actually are. And that gap is where things get even more interesting and uncomfortable.

The Existentialists: Freedom Is Terrifying, You’re Welcome

Then came the existentialists, who basically said: “There is no authentic self to discover. You have to create yourself through your choices, and the anxiety that comes with that freedom is just part of the deal.”

Kierkegaard wanted you to choose an authentic faith while facing reality head-on. Nietzsche wanted you to love your fate (amor fati) and “give style to your character” by integrating all your drives into something coherent. Heidegger popped up to helpfully remind everyone that we’re going to die, so we might as well make choices that matter. Sartre announced that “existence precedes essence” and that we’re condemned to be free, which somehow makes freedom sound like a punishment?

These people were intense. And their version of authenticity requires taking full responsibility for who you’re becoming, which is kind of empowering and terrifying at the same time. They weren’t wrong, exactly. But they also weren’t giving anyone a Tuesday afternoon action plan.

Modern Psychology: Let’s Make This Measurable

Finally, psychology showed up and tried to make authenticity something you could actually study and understand.

Carl Rogers talked about living in alignment with your true values and feelings rather than conforming to what others expect. Winnicott gave us the “true self” versus “false self” framework, suggesting that when we had to comply with others’ expectations too early, we developed an overdependence on certain parts of ourselves at the expense of others. And more recently, researchers like Kernis and Goldman broke authenticity down into four components: awareness, unbiased processing, behavior, and relational authenticity.

Now this is helpful! It’s concrete! But it also reveals the problem: authenticity isn’t just one thing. It’s self-knowledge AND self-acceptance AND values-aligned action AND vulnerable connection. No wonder we’re all confused.

The Workplace, Social Media, and Everything Else: Authenticity™

Modern contexts haven’t made this any clearer. Leadership gurus want you to be an “authentic leader”, while DEI experts rightfully remind us that not everyone can safely be authentic at work without facing discrimination. Brand consultants tell companies to be “authentic” to win customer loyalty, which feels kind of ironic since brands are, by definition, constructions.

And then there’s social media, where we perform our authenticity for an audience rather than practicing it in real life. We’re told to “show up as our authentic selves” online, but it feels like the algorithm rewards whatever gets clicks, not what’s true to who we are.

The concept of authenticity has been stretched across so many domains that it’s started to lose meaning entirely. Or rather, it has so many meanings that we can’t keep them all straight.

So What Now?

Here’s what I take from this extremely brief and incomplete tour through authenticity’s greatest hits: every smart person who has thought about this has landed somewhere slightly different. Some think authenticity is about self-knowledge. Others say it’s about self-creation. Some focus on alignment between inner and outer self, or vulnerability and connection, or resisting social pressure.

These are all interesting things to think about, but none of them can tell you what to do when you’re sitting in a meeting biting your tongue because saying what you actually think feels too risky. Or when you’re scrolling Instagram feeling like everyone else has figured out how to be themselves except you. Or when you know exactly what you value but somehow keep making choices that contradict those values.

That gap between knowing and doing is where most of us actually live.

So that’s what this newsletter is about. Not more analysis of what authenticity means in theory, but experiments in what it looks like in practice. In the ordinary moments of ordinary day when you’re not feeling particularly brave or enlightened or clear.

I’ll be sharing observations and experiments from my own adventures in trying to practice being myself. I’ll invite you to try small things that might close that gap between who you are inside and how you’re showing up in the world. And we’ll figure out together what actually works versus what just sounds good.

Because I’m fairly certain that we don’t need another framework for understanding ourselves (although they are super fun). Like me, you’ve probably done enough of that. What you might need is permission to actually try something different. To experiment. To be yourself in small, specific ways before you attempt the big, scary ones. Consider this your invitation to stop analyzing authenticity and start practicing it.

See you next time.

—Betty