The Cult of "Realness" and Embracing the Multiplicity of Selves

"Real People this, Real People that", no...

In the age of endless self-expression and, if I may, the cult of realness, it has become almost unbearable to witness the continuous calls for authenticity. We are bombarded with mantras that declare the value of being real, as if stripping away will reveal the noble self. The very notion of real people has become an insidious weapon in the arsenal of modern society, aimed at dismantling the mask we all wear and replacing it with a confessional culture where every emotion, every thought, must be laid bare for the sake of validity. But I say this: real people are unrestricted people.

The glorification of authenticity—the idea that there is some deeper, purer self underneath the layers of masquerade—presents a philosophical paradox that demands dismantling. For centuries, philosophers have recognized the role of masks, of façades, not merely as social tools but as essential components of selfhood. Nietzsche famously wrote, “Every profound spirit needs a mask,” comprehending that the self is not a fixed essence but a series of performances, each one tailored to the moment, to the context, to the need of the hour. To strip away these performances, to demand a persistent devotion to some supposed real self, is to misunderstand the complexity of human identity.

• The Performative Nature of the Self

What is this cry for real people if not the demand for a kind of moral transparency, as though the act of pretending, of playing a role, is somehow inauthentic? Yet, the self has never been a static entity, nor has it been a simple, monolithic being creeping beneath our social personas. On the contrary, our identities are fluid, shaped by context, by history, by our relationships with others. If you demand that I be real, then what do you mean by this? Do you mean that I must reveal my innermost thoughts, my darkest fears, my most visceral emotions, to prove that I am not hiding behind a mask? If so, then you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of selfhood.

The self is not revealed in the absence of artifice, but through it. Our social masks—our acquired personas—are not borders to the self, but extensions of it. As Goffman argued in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, life is a stage, and we are all actors, performing roles that reflect the expectations of our social environment. These roles are no less real than the emotions we experience internally, for they are essential to the way we navigate the world. The person who demands realness forgets this fundamental truth: to be human is to perform.

To believe that we can surpass the performative, that there is some factual version of the self waiting to be uncovered, is to surrender in a dangerous form of psychological reductionism. It ignores the reality that we are multiple selves, constantly shifting, adapting, evolving. When someone demands that we be real, they are asking us to serve to a narrow, reductionist vision of identity—one that privileges certain emotions, certain manners of expression, over others. The obsession with realism, with revealing the real you, is, ironically, a demand for unity.

• The Tyranny of Verisimilitude

It is here that we see the authoritarian nature of the cult of real people. In insisting on authenticity, society imposes a moral standard that reduces individuality to a series of confessions. We see this manifest in our obsession with social media influencers who parade their genuine selves in front of us, claiming to strip away the gloss of perfection to reveal the real human behind the image. But this, too, is a performance, and a particularly insidious one at that. The very act of revealing one’s real self is a curated performance designed to demand validation, to uphold a new standard of authenticity that is, paradoxically, just as artificial as the glossy façades it seeks to replace.

When Rousseau extolled the virtues of authenticity, he believed that civilization corrupted the natural goodness of humanity. His vision of a return to a state of nature has echoes in modern cries for realness, but it is no less utopic. Rousseau's ideal of authenticity presupposed a self that existed prior to society, a self untainted by the corrupting influence of culture and deceit. But such a self has never existed. From birth, we are shaped by language, by symbols, by the social structures that surround us. Even the most authentic emotions we experience are judged by the context in which we find ourselves. When we strip away the mask, we do not find some uncorrupted self beneath—it is masks, all the way down.

Moreover, the demand for realness erases the possibility of personal reinvention. If I am always supposed to be real, I am denied the freedom to reinvent myself, to choose which aspects of my identity I wish to highlight and which I wish to hide. This tyranny of authenticity hence becomes a form of social control, limiting the ways in which individuals can express themselves, restricting the diversity of human identity to, in this context, a narrow conception of truth.

• Embracing the Mask

Rather than surrendering to the demands of realness, we must embrace the mask as an essential part of what it means to be human. The mask is not a barrier to intimacy, to connection, to truth—it is the very medium through which these things are made possible. It is through the mask that we interact with others, that we navigate the complexities of social life. Without it, we are left exposed, vulnerable, stripped of the protections that allow us to function in a world of shifting roles and expectations.

In this sense, we might turn to the wisdom of the ancients, particularly the Stoics, who recognized the importance of cultivating an outward persona that aligns with social expectations while maintaining an inner detachment. For the Stoics, authenticity was not about revealing every thought, every emotion, but about maintaining a sense of self-control, about mastering the art of performance. The true self, for them, was not the one that existed behind the mask, but the one that could effortlessly guide the world of appearances.

To live authentically, then, is not to tear down the mask in search of some elusive real self, but to become conscious of the mask and to wield it with mastery. The self is not a singular entity waiting to be revealed, but a multiplicity of selves, each one shaped by context, by history, by the roles we are called upon to play. To demand that we abandon these roles in the name of realness is to misunderstand the nature of identity itself.

So let us reject this insidious call. Let us embrace the mask, not as a tool of deception, but as a necessary part of our humanity. In doing so, we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of authenticity, from the reductionist vision of identity that has gripped our age. And in this embrace of artifice, we may discover a deeper, more profound truth: that the mask is not a barrier to the self, but the self itself.

This is the paradox of authenticity—the more we seek to strip away the mask, the more we lose ourselves in the search for a self that never even existed. True freedom lies not in the pursuit of this notion, but as we said, in the mastery of performance, in the recognition that the self is not a fixed entity but a fluid, dynamic process of becoming. To live authentically is to embrace this process, to wear the mask with pride, and to understand that in the end, it is not the real self that matters, but the one we choose to become.

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