What Is Authenticity, Anyway?

On influence, mimetic desire, social media and AI..

Authenticity is everywhere in the wellness world. We are encouraged to live authentically, teach authentically, show up authentically and build authentic businesses, usually with the implication that somewhere beneath all the expectations, influences and noise there is a more genuine version of ourselves waiting to be uncovered.

I’ve always found the word slightly uncomfortable, partly because I’m not entirely sure what we mean by it. The more I think about authenticity, the harder it becomes to define, particularly now that so much of our lives takes place in a world saturated by social media, algorithms, advertising and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.

If authenticity means being entirely ourselves, perhaps the first question is much more difficult: how much of what we think of as ourselves was ever entirely ours to begin with?

We have always been influenced

None of us develops in isolation. Our ideas about success, attractiveness, relationships, work, health, happiness and even what constitutes a meaningful life emerge through our relationships with other people and the culture around us.

We learn from our families, friends, teachers and communities, but also from books, films, music, advertising and the people we admire. More recently, social media has dramatically increased both the number of people we can observe and the frequency with which we observe them.

This does not necessarily make us less authentic, because human beings have always learned through imitation and influence, but it does make the instruction to simply “be yourself” rather more complicated than it initially sounds.

Who exactly is that self once we remove everything we have absorbed from somewhere else, and is there actually an entirely uninfluenced version of us underneath it all?

René Girard and the things we learn to want

This question makes me think about the work of the French thinker René Girard, who developed what became known as mimetic theory. One of Girard’s central ideas was that human desire is not as independent as we like to imagine, because we often learn what is desirable by observing what other people desire.

We might imagine desire as a straightforward relationship between ourselves and something we want, but Girard suggested that another person often sits somewhere within that relationship. We notice what other people value, pursue and compete for, and those people become models who help teach us what is worth wanting.

Once you start thinking about social media through that lens, it becomes difficult not to see mimesis everywhere.

We don’t simply see a beautiful house; we see somebody whose life we admire living in it. We don’t simply encounter a particular way of eating, exercising or dressing; we see it embodied by people who appear healthy, attractive, successful or content. We see the retreats they attend, the morning routines they follow, the supplements they take, the places they travel to and the ways they talk about their bodies and their lives.

Over time, the boundary between I want this and I have learned that this is something worth wanting can become surprisingly difficult to locate.

Wellness isn’t immune from this

The wellness industry is particularly interesting in this respect because it often presents itself as an antidote to external pressure while simultaneously creating its own models of how a well-lived life should look.

We are encouraged to listen to our bodies and trust ourselves while being surrounded by increasingly detailed instructions about what a person who truly cares for themselves supposedly does. They meditate, journal, practise yoga, strength train, walk ten thousand steps, regulate their nervous system, optimise their sleep, eat in a particular way and somehow maintain excellent boundaries while doing all of it.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things, and many of them may genuinely make our lives better, but Girard’s ideas invite a slightly different question from the usual wellness question of whether something is “good for us”.

How did I come to want this in the first place?

Would I still want this particular body, lifestyle, career, routine or version of wellbeing if I weren’t continually seeing other people pursuing it? Am I choosing something because it genuinely adds something to my life, or because I have absorbed the idea that this is what a healthy, successful or evolved person is supposed to want?

I don’t think those questions have straightforward answers, because our desires don’t arrive conveniently labelled according to where they came from.

Social media has made influence harder to see

There is an important difference between the cultural influences that have always shaped us and the technological environment we inhabit now. The things influencing us are no longer simply the result of whichever books happened to be available, who lived in our community or what appeared on television that evening.

Algorithms increasingly determine which people, ideas, lifestyles and desires we repeatedly encounter. The more we engage with something, the more we are shown versions of it, which can create the impression that a particular way of thinking or living is far more universal than it really is.

Our feeds can begin to reflect our existing interests back to us while simultaneously shaping those interests, making it increasingly difficult to identify where preference ends and reinforcement begins.

This doesn’t mean algorithms control us, but it does mean that the environment in which we are trying to “be ourselves” is actively responding to our behaviour and deciding which versions of the world to show us.

But were our words ever entirely ours either?

The question becomes even more complicated when we move from what we desire to what we create.

Long before generative AI, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes challenged our assumptions about authorship in his famous essay The Death of the Author. Barthes questioned the idea that the author should be treated as the singular source of a text’s meaning, drawing attention instead to the enormous web of language, culture and existing ideas from which writing emerges and to the role of the reader in creating meaning from what has been written.

Even when we write something entirely by ourselves, we are using a language we did not invent. We are drawing on concepts we have encountered elsewhere, expressions we have absorbed, stories we have heard and ways of thinking shaped by the culture around us.

This doesn’t mean that nothing is original or that authorship is meaningless. It simply complicates the comforting idea that something can be completely and exclusively “ours”.

Girard asks us to question the origins of our desires, while Barthes asks us to reconsider the authority and originality we attribute to the individual author. Both become particularly interesting when artificial intelligence enters the picture.

And then along comes AI

Generative AI does something slightly different from the technologies that came before it because it doesn’t simply show us information created by somebody else. It can participate in the process of creating, organising and expressing ideas itself.

It can suggest a sentence we hadn’t thought of, challenge an argument, summarise something we’ve struggled to understand or find words for an idea we haven’t quite managed to articulate.

That creates some uncomfortable questions about authenticity and authorship.

If somebody has an idea and AI helps them articulate it, does that make the resulting piece less authentic? What if AI produces a sentence that makes them think, yes, that is exactly what I mean? What if a person writes every word themselves but carefully constructs an online identity designed around what an algorithm rewards?

Which one is more authentic?

I’m not convinced that “who typed the words?” is enough to answer the question.

This article has its own authenticity problem

There is something slightly ridiculous about the fact that these questions emerged for me through a conversation with AI.

A discussion about how we use technology gradually became a discussion about authenticity, which led to mimetic desire, which led to Girard, and eventually to Barthes and the question of authorship itself.

At that point the whole thing became rather meta.

If an idea develops through a conversation between a person and an AI, where exactly does authorship sit? Is it found in whoever first asked the question, whoever developed the argument, whoever arranged the sentences, or whoever ultimately decides that the finished piece represents something they are willing to stand behind?

I don’t have a particularly neat answer to that, and perhaps wanting one is part of the problem.

Perhaps authenticity was never about being uninfluenced

It would be tempting to respond to all of this by romanticising a time before social media, algorithms and AI, when we were supposedly more connected to our authentic selves, but I don’t think that quite works either.

We have always been influenced by other people, and Girard’s work suggests that imitation isn’t an unfortunate modern corruption of human nature but something fundamental to it. We learn through other people, understand ourselves in relation to them and frequently discover new possibilities precisely because somebody else showed us that those possibilities existed.

Likewise, we have always created through languages, traditions and ideas that existed before us. AI intensifies and complicates these processes, but it didn’t invent them.

The problem therefore may not be influence itself.

Perhaps the more useful question is whether we are aware enough of those influences to examine them.

If there is no completely untouched self underneath everything we have absorbed, authenticity might have less to do with discovering our “true” desires and more to do with developing a conscious relationship with the desires, values and identities we have acquired.

Perhaps authenticity is closer to discernment

The more I think about it, the less convinced I am that authenticity and originality are the same thing.

Something doesn’t necessarily have to originate entirely within us to become genuinely meaningful to us. We can encounter an idea in a book, learn a practice from a teacher, discover something through another person, hear an argument that changes our mind or even find language through AI and consciously decide that it reflects something we believe.

Perhaps the important distinction is not between influence and no influence, but between examined and unexamined influence.

That would mean authenticity isn’t achieved by somehow escaping culture, technology or other people, because none of us can do that. Instead, it might involve becoming more curious about what is shaping us and taking responsibility for what we ultimately choose to put our name to, build our lives around or pass on to somebody else.

Perhaps that is particularly important within wellness, where we are constantly encouraged to find the practice, routine, diet, philosophy or lifestyle that will bring us closer to ourselves.

Instead of continually asking what else we should add, perhaps occasionally we need to ask a different set of questions: Where did I learn to want this? Who or what is influencing me here? Does this still make sense for my life, and would I choose it again?

I don’t think authenticity means finding a version of ourselves that has never been influenced, because I am increasingly unconvinced that such a person exists.

Perhaps authenticity is something much less pure and much more human: becoming more conscious of what has shaped us, deciding what we want to keep, and taking responsibility for what we choose to make our own.