The Curated Self: Why Authenticity is a Performance Art
My eyes burned, staring at the little red light on my laptop camera. The script in my head, ‘just be yourself,’ felt like a cruel joke. I attempted a smile – the kind that says, ‘I’m genuinely enthusiastic but also incredibly professional and grounded.’ It came out looking more like a grimace, a forced contortion of someone trying to remember what ‘normal’ joy felt like. I deleted the recording. Take five. Then take six. Each attempt sounded less like me and more like a carefully engineered chatbot, programmed to deliver ‘sincere authenticity’ on demand.
It’s not just me, is it? We’re told, constantly, to ‘bring our whole selves’ to the table, to ‘be authentic,’ to ‘show up.’ But then, every application process, every interview, every performance review, comes with an invisible rubric. We are simultaneously asked to reveal our true selves and to conform to a hyper-specific, unspoken ideal. It’s a paradox that leaves us in a kind of professional purgatory, where the most authentic version of ourselves is often the one that’s been most meticulously practiced and refined.
The Rubric of “Cultural Fit”
I remember arguing this point once, quite passionately, about an internal assessment process at a previous company. I laid out a comprehensive argument, supported by a stack of research papers and real-world examples, demonstrating how the very structure designed to reveal ‘cultural fit’ was instead




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