Becoming Real: The Psychology of Selfhood in an Imitative Age

Transcript

When I look around at the psychology of modern life, one theme seems to appear everywhere: the performance of authenticity. People want to be seen as real. They talk about it, brand themselves with it, and measure others by it. But beneath that cultural obsession is a strange contradiction—our hunger for realness has made us more artificial than ever.

I’ve spent years thinking about why that is. The question is not simply cultural, but psychological. What does it mean to feel authentic in a world where selfhood has become a kind of theater? Why do so many people, especially younger generations, describe a sense of fragmentation—of playing parts, of living through a public version of themselves that only partly feels like “me”?

To understand this, we need to begin with something fundamental: the process of individuation.

Individuation is the slow, developmental work of becoming a person—integrating experience, defining boundaries, and forming an identity that is both distinct and connected. Jung described it as the path toward wholeness. It’s what allows us to be in relationship without losing ourselves, to adapt to social life without dissolving into imitation.

But individuation, by its nature, requires friction. You have to encounter resistance—limitations, difference, disapproval—to define who you are. The modern world, however, has made friction feel optional. We can curate identity instead of forging it. We can construct the appearance of depth without ever meeting the discomfort that produces it.

That’s what I mean when I say we’ve replaced authenticity with performance. We haven’t lost the desire to be real; we’ve simply learned to display it in more palatable ways. The culture rewards signals of authenticity—imperfection, vulnerability, candor—but not the slow, private labor that true authenticity demands.

I sometimes tell my students that authenticity, in its truest sense, is not a look or a mood. It’s the outcome of internal coherence. When your thoughts, emotions, and actions are aligned, you don’t have to prove that you’re real. You feel it. The world may or may not validate it, but the experience itself is self-sufficient.

That kind of alignment used to be supported by social structures that grounded people in continuity—family, religion, civic life, long-term institutions. Today, those structures have weakened. We’ve traded stability for possibility, and while that opens doors, it also leaves the self unanchored. When everything becomes fluid, we start looking for solidity in the wrong places—in image, feedback, and recognition.

What follows is what psychologists call a validation loop. Our sense of reality begins to depend on being seen. You can observe it in small ways: posting a thought, waiting for reactions, measuring sincerity by engagement. None of this is inherently pathological; it’s simply how social learning has been digitized. But psychologically, it creates dependency.

When the mirrors around us multiply—when we are reflected back through hundreds of images, opinions, and metrics—identity becomes less about self-definition and more about self-maintenance. We spend enormous energy trying to hold together a version of ourselves that others can recognize, even when it no longer feels alive inside.

That dissonance—the gap between image and experience—is where much of modern anxiety lives. People describe it as imposter syndrome, burnout, self-doubt, or emptiness, but beneath those names is a common root: the fatigue of continuous performance.

There’s a scene I often think about from early adulthood. You move to a new city, start a job, try to establish your identity in a new environment. At first, every action feels intentional—you’re shaping who you want to be. But after a while, the shape hardens. You find yourself maintaining it rather than living it. The world reflects back an image of you, and you begin to serve that image.

That’s the subtle psychological trap of imitation—it doesn’t always feel false. It feels safe. Imitation grants belonging. It reduces the anxiety of difference. But over time, it erodes agency. You forget where the borrowed traits end and where you begin.

In Jungian terms, individuation is the process of reclaiming what’s been projected—recognizing which parts of your life were lived for recognition and which were lived from conviction. That’s not an intellectual exercise; it’s an emotional reckoning. It asks you to notice the internal tension between who you’ve become and who you still feel yourself to be underneath.

When people talk about a “midlife crisis,” that’s often what’s happening. It’s not immaturity or vanity—it’s the psyche demanding reintegration. The old imitations no longer work. The persona, that socially constructed mask, cracks under the weight of neglected authenticity.

But crises of authenticity are happening earlier now. Adolescents and young adults experience them before identity has even fully formed. Social media accelerates what used to unfold gradually. The adolescent’s experimental self—once a private rehearsal space—has become a live performance. Every gesture, every mistake, every emotional outburst can be captured, shared, and judged. That’s not just social pressure; it’s developmental compression.

Under that pressure, the self learns to anticipate rather than explore. It becomes hyperaware of audience reaction, internalizing the gaze of others before expressing anything at all. Over time, this anticipation replaces genuine self-expression with strategic expression.

What results is a paradoxical self: open, visible, and endlessly expressive—but emotionally guarded. People learn to disclose without revealing. They share feelings as content, not communication. The inner life becomes stylized.

And yet, I don’t think this is a story of moral decline or narcissism. It’s a story of adaptation. Human beings are social learners. We imitate before we individuate. That’s how development works. The problem arises when imitation never gives way to integration—when reflection never deepens into ownership.

A culture that constantly tells you to “be yourself” without giving you time to find yourself creates an impossible double bind. You’re supposed to be authentic instantly. But real self-knowledge doesn’t operate on demand; it unfolds through contact with reality, through mistakes, solitude, and unfiltered experience.

We’ve begun to confuse immediacy with authenticity. The faster something feels, the truer it must be. But emotion that hasn’t been metabolized isn’t truth; it’s reactivity. And reactivity is often a defense against the discomfort of deeper feeling.

This is one of the reasons therapy can feel so different from everyday life. In therapy, the rhythm slows down. The performance stops. The therapist isn’t asking you to be interesting or coherent; they’re asking you to be in contact—to stay with your own experience long enough to notice what’s underneath it. That’s where real authenticity begins, not in expression, but in awareness.

When we lose that capacity for awareness, we become hungry for proof. We start collecting evidence of realness—raw language, unscripted moments, visible emotion. But the more we try to prove it, the less convincing it becomes, because authenticity doesn’t scale. It can’t survive the logic of marketing or metrics. It exists in lived relation, not in broadcast.

You can see this paradox in the rise of the “relatable influencer,” whose brand depends on appearing ordinary. The image of imperfection becomes the new performance of perfection. We’ve made vulnerability fashionable, which sounds progressive until you realize how much of it is choreographed.

Still, I don’t dismiss that impulse. The desire to appear real is, at its core, a desire for contact. People want to feel known. They want to close the distance between their inner and outer lives. The tragedy is that the methods offered by culture—visibility, confession, aesthetic imperfection—only widen the gap.

So what’s the alternative? How do we recover a sense of authenticity that isn’t just another pose?

First, we have to recognize that authenticity is not a static trait but a dynamic process. It’s not something you have or don’t have—it’s something you practice. The practice involves three ongoing movements: awareness, alignment, and acceptance.

Awareness is the capacity to notice your internal state without judgment. Alignment is the effort to bring behavior into coherence with what you truly value. And acceptance is the humility to live with the parts of yourself that remain unfinished.

That third part is especially hard in a perfectionistic culture. We treat inconsistency as hypocrisy, when in fact it’s a sign of growth. The self that matures is not one that becomes perfectly unified, but one that learns to tolerate its own contradictions.

When you can hold those contradictions—when you can acknowledge both the performing self and the private self without disowning either—you start to experience authenticity as integration rather than purity. You stop trying to be real enough and begin to be real as you are.

I think of individuation as the lifelong process of reconciling the inner multiplicity of the psyche. You’re not one fixed identity; you’re a conversation among parts. Some of those parts are inherited, others imitated, others discovered through living. Individuation isn’t about erasing imitation; it’s about transforming it. What was once external influence becomes internal wisdom when you metabolize it instead of rejecting it.

Take the example of a young artist who begins by copying others. At first, imitation is a way of learning technique. Over time, if the artist stays honest, they begin to sense where imitation ends and expression begins. That threshold is the birth of authenticity. But it’s born through imitation, not in spite of it.

The same applies to the psychological self. We all begin by imitating—parents, peers, heroes. The task isn’t to avoid imitation; it’s to move through it, integrating what’s useful and discarding what’s false.

Modern culture, however, doesn’t give us the space for that integration. It keeps us suspended in the early phase—always expressing, never consolidating. We’ve built entire economies on perpetual self-reinvention. The more you change, the more you engage; the more you engage, the more the system profits. Stability doesn’t monetize well.

This is why individuation today is an act of quiet rebellion. To slow down, to think privately, to resist the demand for constant exhibition—that’s not avoidance, that’s psychological self-defense.  

I sometimes ask my students to imagine what it would mean to live a life that doesn’t require constant broadcasting. What would it mean to be known by depth rather than visibility? Most pause when I ask that, because the i dea feels almost foreign. But that pause—that silence—is where individuality starts to reappear.

Being unseen has become our last taboo. We associate invisibility with irrelevance, yet invisibility is where identity breathes. The unobserved moments—when no one is evaluating or approving—are where authenticity repairs itself.

The philosopher Charles Taylor once wrote that modern identity is “dialogical,” meaning we become ourselves in conversation with others. That’s true, but I’d add that the conversation must include silence. Without silence, the dialogue turns into performance.

Psychologically, silence functions like sleep. It restores integration. The constant noise of reaction keeps the self disjointed—awake but not alive.

When I look at the epidemic of anxiety, burnout, and emotional exhaustion today, I don’t see a failure of resilience; I see a failure of integration. People are trying to live multiple selves at once without rest. They are overstimulated but under-centered.

The remedy is not to abandon technology or retreat from society, but to recover the rhythm of inwardness. Inwardness is not isolation; it’s depth of contact with one’s own mind. It’s the ability to observe without instantly sharing, to feel without immediately framing.

That ability has profound psychological effects. When people regain inwardness, they begin to notice the subtle textures of experience that performance had flattened: the quiet ambivalence beneath certainty, the nuance behind anger, the tenderness beneath cynicism. They become more complex, which is to say, more human.

Authenticity, in this light, is not about simplicity or transparency—it’s about depth. The authentic person is not the one who shows everything, but the one whose inner and outer lives are in dialogue. They don’t need to reveal every emotion to prove that they have them; they express what is true for the moment, anchored by a private awareness of the larger whole.

That’s what individuation ultimately offers: a sense of continuity across change. You remain yourself even as you evolve, because you’re grounded in relationship with your own mind.

We need to teach this more explicitly, especially in psychology. Too often, discussions of authenticity stop at the level of self-expression, when what people are truly yearning for is self-possession. Self-possession doesn’t mean control—it means belonging to yourself. It’s the internal ownership that allows you to move through imitation without losing integrity.

When that ownership is strong, imitation becomes learning. When it’s weak, imitation becomes dependence. And dependence on external mirrors makes the self brittle. The moment reflection is withdrawn—when attention fades or feedback turns critical—the person feels erased. That fragility is at the heart of our cultural malaise.

To repair it, we need to re-educate people in the art of interior life. Not just meditation or self-care, but sustained self-examination—the ability to trace your motivations, to discern which impulses are authentically yours and which are inherited performances.

I believe psychology’s next frontier isn’t more data or diagnoses; it’s re-teaching people how to inhabit themselves. How to think privately, how to feel deeply, how to tolerate contradiction without fleeing into certainty or display.

When we talk about being real, that’s what we’re pointing toward—not exhibition, but embodiment. To be real is to live from within rather than from the outside in. It’s to anchor identity in experience rather than image.

If we can do that—even partially—we begin to reverse the current. We move from a culture of imitation to one of integration. We stop asking how to seem genuine and start cultivating the conditions that allow us to be genuine.

And perhaps that’s the quiet revolution of our time—not louder expression, but deeper presence. A return to the unobserved self. A kind of moral psychology of attention, where being real isn’t a performance but a practice of awareness.

So when I speak of the pressure to be real, I’m not lamenting the loss of some golden age of authenticity. I’m describing a developmental challenge that every generation must face in its own language. Today’s language just happens to be digital, accelerated, and performative. But the underlying question is timeless: how do I live in truth with myself in the presence of others?

That question doesn’t have a viral answer. It’s answered moment by moment, in how you pay attention, how you act, how you reconcile the different versions of yourself that the world demands.

To be real is not to be raw. It’s to be integrated. And integration, as every psychologist knows, is not the end of the story—it’s the beginning of maturity.