Now it means crying on LinkedIn about your divorce while tagging Richard Branson.
Authenticity has become the avocado toast of corporate virtue signalling, overhyped, vaguely performative, and very suspiciously choreographed.
Somewhere along the line, we stopped being ourselves and started ‘branding’ ourselves as ourselves.
There’s now an entire industry helping people ‘be authentic’ through mood boards, vulnerability workshops, and TEDx talks where someone cries on cue.
Which is a bit like hiring someone to teach you how to laugh at your own jokes. Or worse, staring balefully into a ring light because your content calendar says, ‘Tuesday: vulnerable post’.
Authenticity, when it’s real, is wonderfully inefficient. It’s messy, unpredictable, forgets birthdays, loses receipts, blurts out odd things at dinner, and once called the CEO dad by accident (true story, so shameful).
It hits reply-all at the wrong time, to the wrong people, saying absolutely the wrong thing. It overshares at precisely the wrong moment and this is exactly why it’s so bloody refreshing.
But instead we reward the theatre of authenticity more than the thing itself. We’ve built a world where being ‘seen’ to be vulnerable is more important than being honest, and where ‘just being myself’ somehow requires a personal brand strategist and three rounds of revisions.
Here’s a scandalous idea:
If you have to ‘try’ to be authentic, you’ve already failed.
It’s like spontaneity. The moment it’s scheduled, it’s dead.
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