The Struggle To Be Authentic

Three forces keeping you from yourself

I spent years feeling like I was alive but never truly living.

A low-grade disconnection that I couldn’t quite articulate. It felt like I was watching my own life from outside myself, following a script I didn’t remember agreeing to.

When I discovered the concept of authenticity, it felt like I finally saw the light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel. Here, perhaps, was the root of that trapped feeling.

But inspiration, I soon learned, doesn’t translate into implementation. How does one actually be authentic? And why does attempting it feel so life-threatening?

These questions themselves reveal a certain privilege — the luxury of even contemplating authenticity rather than focusing purely on survival. Not everyone has that luxury. Some people’s circumstances demand they keep performing, keep masking, because their survival depends on it.

For those of us who do have that privilege, we remain trapped. Why? Because you can’t dismantle what you don’t see. Let’s trace the forces that bury our authenticity and keep it buried.

The Narrative We Mistake For Truth

“We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin

When we’re young and helpless, we literally rely on the adults around us for survival. From tender ages before we can even make sense of anything, we’re taught to behave in certain ways. We notice that some behaviors get rewarded with love and attention whilst others are shunned. Naturally, we lean toward what secures the attention we desperately need.

This process continues throughout childhood, forming the basis of our identity. Personality, when you trace it back, is simply adaptation to the environment. A concoction of genuine traits and conditioned ones accumulated over time.

This narrative becomes self-reinforcing. As we take action, our brains use that as evidence to construct a narrative of who we are. Based on who we think we are, we carry out certain actions — reinforcing the loop. Through commitment and consistency bias, we then defend this constructed identity so vigorously that we cannot imagine alternatives.

Without awareness of our ability to change — to challenge our preconceived notions of identity — we remain boxed in, trapped by the stories we tell ourselves and that society tells us.

This is what I’ve come to see as the first challenge to authenticity: not even knowing you’re living a false self because your true self has been buried so long.

“We suffer from a case of mistaken identity. Our culture has sold us a bill of goods about who we really are.” — Dick Schwartz

This disconnection may be subtle — a spark of doubt sitting underneath your act. Never quite strong enough to initiate change, but substantial enough that you can’t ignore it entirely. This narrative acts like a tax on your life, a constant drain on your mental resources.

The Status Games We Can’t Afford To Lose

Here’s where it gets expensive. As you continue living out your narrative and following its prescribed scripts, you may start accumulating social credits: the prestigious degree, the respectable job, the six-figure salary, the beautiful house, the enviable holidays.

Life looks great on the surface. But inside, that sense of dissonance grows with a dawning realization — the contentment you were promised by ticking these boxes seems to elude you. The opposite occurs: a growing discontentment with how your life is unfolding.

With your pursuit of the default definition of success, you’ve played a game that optimised for external optics rather than internal fulfillment, driven by the ego’s need to be seen as superior. It’s a natural part of being a social animal — managing our image and relative position in the herd. But here’s what makes status particularly insidious: it doesn’t just trap you in a performance — it convinces you the performance is authentic.

The deeper you invest in these markers, the harder it becomes to distinguish between what you genuinely want and what you’ve learned you’re supposed to want. Your status, built on external metrics, feels expensive to walk away from. Your relative success at the game makes it all the more enticing to keep playing.

“Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” — Paul Graham

This is the second barrier: the opportunity cost of walking away feels unbearable, even when staying costs you more. The status you’ve built doesn’t just trap you, it rewrites your story about who you think you are and what you think you want.

The Tribe We Fear Losing

Even if we see through the inherited narratives and recognize the status trap, a third force, perhaps the most primal, keeps us locked in place. Because choosing authenticity doesn’t just risk losing status. It means risking rejection — being criticized, judged, potentially losing relationships that matter to us.

This is agonizing, and it feels life-threatening — because in our evolutionary past, rejection by the herd was life-threatening. Our drive to belong, to fit in and be accepted, runs deep. When that safety is threatened, our emotional brains activate their ancient protection protocols.

This biological reaction served its purpose in hunter-gatherer times but holds us back in modern life, keeping us conforming to societal expectations even when those expectations conflict with who we actually are.

For those of us with the privilege of independence and self-reliance, social rejection is no longer a death sentence. It only feels like one.

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

These three forces — narrative, status, conformity — don’t operate in isolation. They interlock, each one reinforcing the others, creating a cage that feels impossible to escape.

But “feels impossible” isn’t the same as “is impossible.”

Choosing Authenticity

So how do we escape these forces? Not through dramatic reinvention or overnight transformation. The path to authenticity is subtler and more difficult than that.

“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

I won’t sugarcoat this. It’s uncomfortable. It involves pain.

The question isn’t whether you’ll experience pain — it’s which pain you’ll choose. Continuing to live life according to others’ expectations, with regret compounding toward end of life? Or temporary discomfort and loneliness, with the promise of a life lived more fully on the other side?

For me, discovering authenticity started with recognizing agency — understanding that you have more choice than you think in who you are and how you live. The narratives you’ve woven aren’t the only possible stories. You’re the author. You can rewrite the script.

This doesn’t mean rejecting everything about your current life. I’m not suggesting you quit your job, abandon relationships, or move to a monastery. Authenticity isn’t about automatic rejection of the default script. It’s about examining each element consciously and making choices untethered from societal expectations or ingrained conditioning.

It’s asking yourself: “Is this what I actually want, or what I learned to want?”

Here’s what I’ve learned: authenticity isn’t a one-off decision or overnight reinvention. It’s a daily practice, a way of being you choose consistently.

It’s a process of discovery that unfolds as you peel back layers of adaptation. There’s no moment of sudden enlightenment where your “true self” is fully revealed. There’s only iterative improvement, each choice bringing you closer to alignment between your inner experience and outer expression.

Begin Here

This week, notice one moment where you perform rather than simply be.

Don’t try to change it yet. Just observe the gap between what you feel and what you express. Write it down.

That observation — that tiny act of witnessing — is the first crack in the narrative. And through that crack, everything becomes possible.

If you enjoyed this deep-dive, you’ll enjoy Micro Misconcepts.

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