Everybody wants to be authentic until someone calls them cringe

The value of being ourselves in a sea of everybodies

Answer (2025), Thomas Amen

Over the past month, I’ve been thinking about a conversation I had with a friend. I asked, “Can we be online and be ourselves?” and he replied, “No, I don’t think so.”

The conversation simply ended there, hanging between us momentarily in a look people share when the truth has been spoken and there’s nothing more to be said.

But it continued in my head. It’s a thought I started in my last piece, when I said that social media makes personas of people. It’s unsurprising, given the unnatural degree to which we’re perceived and accessible, that regular people are now casual performance artists.

Even the people I know who hardly ever post to social only share a highly curated version of themselves that doesn’t reflect anything about who they really are. I look at the polished, aspirational cuts of their life and scrunch my nose at their inauthenticity. Where is the messy/goofy/awkward/bitchy person I know and love? Those are the qualities that get edited out first, but they are the qualities that make a person most real and most likeable to me.

Obviously, I’m not immune to the performance aspect of being online. I go back and forth with my own authenticity; this is especially hard with neurodivergence, wherein existing publicly is often a performance in and of itself. When who you are is someone who doesn’t fit in, you do your best to dial down aspects of yourself that might arouse suspicion. Being on the spectrum in the world at large mostly feels like being one of these memes, and I’m conditioned to think that being myself is the worst thing I can do.

As I’ve become more comfortable with myself, I’ve realised that the things I like most about myself are the same things I’ve tried hardest to hide. They’re the things that make me the most “extra” or “too much” to a lot of people, so it doesn’t surprise me that the times I most enjoy freely expressing myself are the times that some people find me the most cringe.

Cringe. When did this become a mainstay of our social vernacular, and why are we so afraid of it? Online, cringe is the worst thing that you can be; it’s social suicide at scale. It’s also the stalker of authenticity; it’ll lurk behind every thought we want to express, making us watchful of its shadow; by venturing out, we risk being the next victim of this stabby murderer, so it’s safer just to stay inside and never show ourselves. So sad.

But the way that it works is that as the arbiters of cringe, we are the stalkers of other people’s authenticity. We trap ourselves and others in a resin of social acceptability—never offending, never authentic.

The only authentic people who aren’t cringe are the ones with enough social lubrication to make them go down easy; really funny or really hot people are palatable, sugar-coated pills that get a pass.

I think this is why Taylor Swift is so successful. I’ve always thought it more than a little sus that a singer-songwriter who looks like a supermodel is the voice of a generation; I’ve personally never seen anyone less relatable in all my life, but the people buy what she’s selling.

If Taylor Swift is any indication, authenticity has to be aspirational. If you’re even a little bit awkward, or a little too vulnerable, forget it. You’re tragic. You’re a loser. You don’t get to be authentic if you don’t make people want to be like you.

I wonder how much our judgment of cringe, and therefore our fear of it, stops us from being ourselves. Not even just openly: how much do we also deny ourselves privately?

Cringe conditions us to not like the aspects of ourselves that we’re afraid other people won’t like. We start to view ourselves through the lens of other people’s screens, worrying more about how we look than how we feel. We care more about what other people think of us than what we think of ourselves.

There are two things we overlook here:

1. It’s impossible to know what other people actually think of us.

2. Everybody views everybody else through the lens of their own bias that has nothing to do with anybody else.

We all have our own filters that make us judge other people, and we’ve spent our whole lives accumulating them. We can’t possibly compete with other people’s socio-cultural wiring. So what we do instead is look at socio-cultural norms ie. what’s proven to work and be likeable. And we try to be like that.

We all try to be like that.

Which reduces us, en masse, to the lowest common denominator. Out with authentic, in with basic—which, aside from cringe, is what we’re told is the worst thing to be.

So how are we supposed to be authentic, exactly?

My take is that authenticity is a scam; what we call authentic is someone being celebrated for being themselves, which is only true when it’s someone we want to be like. What makes a person authentic is not the same as what makes a handbag or a painting authentic; as far as being online goes, it doesn’t add value. Authentic goods are more expensive, which makes people want them more; authentic people are more accessible, which makes people reject them more. Real authenticity makes us uncomfortable, and nobody is trying to buy that.

I make this comparison because being online has gradually and insidiously opted us into a commodification of the self. Platforms are just online real estate; we are essentially living in ad space, and at some point, we as consumers became the consumed.

Is everything online for sale, including us? Some analyst somewhere—or Mark Zuckerberg—can probably identify the exact point at which we signed a Faustian bargain to be online. It was probably buried in the data privacy clause of some update we didn’t look at closely enough, because who reads Ts&Cs?

I saved this meme in 2015. Each year it becomes more true and less funny.

To a great extent, I’m not sure we belong to ourselves anymore. Maybe authenticity—the real kind that makes people really uncomfortable, the way vampires hiss when they see the sunlight—is an act of resistance; a reminder that, fuck you, I know who I am, whether you are interested in it or not. It’s staking our claim on the only online real estate we own, which is ourselves.

This is especially important the more we use tools that make life easier for all of us. If there’s anything that watching the internet unfold to reveal its capitalistic agendas like the world’s worst origami has taught us, nothing online is for free. I suspect we’re trading convenience for being herded away from our own complex identities into something altogether more homogenous and easier to manipulate. AI—that’s artificial intelligence, lest we forget—is levelling more than just the playing field.

You know what’s the antithesis of authentic? Artificial.

OK bye,

PS Authenticity is inextricably linked to perception, so that’s my next rabbit hole. Coming soon 👀