You’re asking the same question I asked myself at three in the morning: do we really have a “true self,” or is it just a story we tell to survive? Authenticity, in a world that’s a stage, is the quiet insistence that we remember who we were before the applause. It means saying no when the role demands it, even if that hurts. It’s that little act of looking into your own eyes and saying, “I am not this.” In practice, it’s a stubborn refusal to let the crowd rewrite the ending. That’s all there is to it.