Today’s obsession with authenticity isn’t new – being true to yourself has troubled philosophers for centuries
Publish Date: 2026-03-06 08:39:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
Today’s youth cherish “authenticity,” but is it a virtue? According to a report from Ernst & Young, more than 9 in 10 Gen Z respondents indicated that being authentic and true to yourself is extremely or very important. In fact, most of them claimed authenticity is more important than any other personal value.
This finding is not all that surprising: All of us live in an age where we’re bombarded by social media and artificial intelligence – when striving to be your authentic self becomes an increasingly difficult task.
Yet, even if it has somehow become a common goal, it is unclear how many of us can truly define the “authenticity” that we say we are pursuing. I think it’s also worth asking whether sincerity and authenticity are perennial human virtues or just obsessions of this technological age.
As a scholar in the history of political thought and American political development, I think two philosophers can help us understand this problem and how to deal with it: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Martin Heidegger.
Sincerity: A counter to modernity
Rousseau, the 18th-century philosopher from Geneva, arrived in the wake of earlier Enlightenment philosophers, such as Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu.
These thinkers laid many of the foundations for how people understand liberal democracy today, especially the emphasis on individual natural rights – to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s later formulation, all human beings are “endowed” with these rights at birth or by nature. In particular, Hobbes popularized the idea of generating a commonwealth in order to escape the uncertainty in a state of nature where self-preservation is fundamental. Locke also emphasized the right to property, while Montesquieu saw the importance of international commerce, among other aspects, including the separation of powers.
But Rousseau became famous for his criticisms of the individualistic civil society born out of their thought. In the modern commercial…
