How few are authentic

All of us operate in the presence of countless social filters that influence what we think, feel, and do. You are conditioned from a young age to develop and apply a filter to prevent the expression of anything that would exceed the tolerance of the masses in what you say or do in public, and you develop a similar but individualized filter for each person you come to know personally. The filters become so well established that by the time you reach maturity, you’ve long-since forgotten you have them.

Each of us has a different willingness to maintain sovereignty over what we think, feel, and do, and most exercise very little. For example, a famous set of experiments by a psychologist named Asch showed that only 25% of people will act outwardly according to what they believe to be truth contrary to public opinion,¹ and the constraints of the experiment make this a best case scenario. Far fewer still will live authentically when it costs more than just soft social disapproval.