The Cost of Being Yourself
Why Authenticity Isn’t Always the Advice You Think It Is
Everyone says, just be yourself. Be authentic. Do you. I believed it. I lived it. And looking back… maybe that’s the worst advice anyone could give. Because the truth is, the world doesn’t want you to be yourself. Conformity is built into us. Belonging is survival. Step outside the tribe, and you get eaten—figuratively, sometimes literally. Once, a tattoo put you on the fringe of society. Now? Not having one makes you the oddball.
Me? I’m a weirdo. No tattoos. Not what makes me weird. I’m weird because I speak the truth, I can’t stomach bullshit, I don’t fit in, and I hunt for the strange in the world—friends, art, music, the stranger the better. But authenticity is expensive. My humor causes chaos. My honesty ends friendships. My insistence on being myself? It breeds loneliness.
All my life I wanted to create. To live by creating. Authenticity wasn’t optional—it was survival. In the ’80s, being called a “poser” in a music circle was a death sentence. Fake musicians, camera-ready but talent-light, you didn’t want that label.
In the real world, though? Most people are posers. They show up at jobs they tolerate, pretend to love them, follow rules that make no sense, hide their thoughts, swallow their originality. It makes me physically sick. But it works. You get a nice midlife resume and a quiet life of mediocrity.
Or, you can just be yourself and end up at 55 with a resume that reads like chaos. A little of everything, nothing linear, a life littered with craters from refusing to play along. Following the rules would’ve made things easier. But no—you had to do you. And you wait, thinking someday being yourself will pay off.
Spoiler: maybe it won’t. “Just be yourself” is a stupid poster, like that cat dangling from a branch: hang in there. We know the cat is going to fall. Humans? We don’t land on our feet. We break. We bleed. We get one fragile life to figure out this absurd world.
No lesson here. Just a warning: be yourself… if yourself doesn’t wreck things for everyone else. But if you’re weird, like me… strap in and proceed with caution.
Take it easy,
James