Authenticity Is Dead. Long Live the Mask.
on the phenomenon of developing a dialectical sense of self to transcend concrete consciousness… or something like that
Hi, I’m an existential imbecile named Max Murphy. Here on The Murphy Memos we explore the absurdity of existence with crappy cartoons.
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I have two regrets in life:
Thinking my face was my True Self™
Not following
sooner
The second is easier to explain. Karlsson is one of those rare writers who can take a tired cultural cliché and hold it up to the light until it fractures. In a recent Substack Note, he made an observation that’s been keeping me up at night:
“The problem is that any idea that becomes dominant and high status—as the idea of being authentic has these days—any idea that gets embraced by many people will be transformed into a dark version of itself.”
He was talking about authenticity, but the insight applies to everything — but especially to personal identity.
What we can call the social mask: the persona you wear in public life, the curated self that’s less like a photograph and more like a costume.
Some are protective.
Some are functional.
All of them rot if worn for too long.
costume parties, or what it means to wear a mask
"I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party, and I attended with my real face." —Franz Kafka
Human beings are multi-faceted creatures. Coupled with the infinite of the universe, and you have a real need for what Ernest Becker called a “partialization of life.”
There is simply too much raw data floating around the world.
Instead of being overwhelmed by the everything, we flatten the world into manageable chunks.
One of the most important dimensions where this takes place is with our identity. Not the private identity either, but the social one—the parts of yourself you show to others in various social contexts.
These social masks are often subconscious.
Let’s say you were really silly on the first day of kindergarten.
Always laughing, telling jokes, and amusing others around you.
People might call you a class clown.
And maybe it sticks.
Next thing you know you’re a struggling stand up comedian who can only keep the lights on thanks to the OnlyFans side gig (don’t worry bro, I’m only using OnlyFans ironically as an inside joke).
Masks can be sticky like that.
When people start thinking of you as “the class clown” that perception becomes ever more solidified as your sense of self. The mask starts to feel like “you.”
But even good masks come with a cost.
the mask i thought would save me
It was about 10 o’clock at night.
We made our way up the curvy mountainside road beneath an endless array of dingy yellow street lights.
Out of nowhere, a car swerved directly toward my friends and I.
There were 3 of us.
We dodged the vehicle by hopping into a ditch on the side of the road.
The car stopped.
What looked like five grown men piled out of the car, and immediately started chasing us.
This is how I grew up.
We got away that night—thank fuck—but it solidified cynical advice my drunken bastard father taught me: always be ready to fight.
This world was a really violent place.
You can perpetrate that violence.
Or, you can be victimized by it.
This little incident was proof.
But deep down I knew: I couldn’t build a future on fists. That mask—the angry white boy—wasn’t going to get me anywhere.
When my family moved out of New York a few months later, I decided to try something else.
the thug that became a nerd
I engineered my own reinvention, more earnestly than cynically.
Bought glasses. Buttoned shirts. Khakis. Gave 110% in school.
Within weeks, I had gone from “white-trash gangster wannabe” to “the smart kid.” And what shocked me most wasn’t the change itself—it was how easily everyone else accepted it.
They totally bought it—hook, line, and stinker.
This is why you should listen to Gen Z when they tell you to “commit to the bit.” It’s a silly internet meme, yes, but also a profound insight into human growth and potential.
Teachers told me that I “looked smart.”
Classmates assumed I was a nerd.
Even I started to believe it.
Little did they know that only months earlier I had a comparable background to Eminem before he got famous.
This nerd mask gave me oxygen where I’d been suffocating for years.
With enough time, I learned how to breathe.
when the mask becomes you
The nerd persona bought me safety, stability, and—eventually—opportunity.
It gave teachers a reason to forgive my mistakes, to see me as promising rather than hopeless. It put me on a trajectory my old mask never could.
But even the good masks rot if you wear them too long.
The nerd mask came with side effects:
I forced myself through classics I didn’t enjoy, while the rest of the class watched movies (couldn’t even allow myself to enjoy Frozen 😭)
I branded myself as a walking textbook, which isn’t exactly the best friendship strategy
I developed a bottomless hunger to “know everything,” which is really just a recipe for feeling perpetually behind
First the mask saved me.
Then, the mask trapped me.
the dark side of good ideas
Which brings me back to Karlsson’s line:
“The problem is that any idea that becomes dominant and high status… will be transformed into a dark version of itself.”
Authenticity becomes performance.
Intelligence becomes pretension.
Masculinity becomes violence.
There is good in the bad and bad in the good. Especially in social masks. Not to get started on some ying yang wuu wuu nonsense but…
Masks are not inherently bad, but they can calcify.
They stick to your face until you forget they were masks in the first place.
Even my white-trash wannabe gangster mask had a grain of good: physical safety. (Maybe this is my repressed toxic masculinity talking, but I’ve been in plenty of fights… and I’ve never lost one.)
There is no perfect mask.
Nor is there a truly “authentic” self.
Our mission—as human beings—is to try on many masks, find the grains of good, reject the bad, and incorporate them into a multidimensional sense of self so we can transcend the limits of concrete consciousness.
Take another hit homie, because we’re going even deeper.
toward a dialectical self
Here’s where I’ve landed:
Masks are more than clever social deceptions. They’re experiments. You try one on, internalize it, and if you do this enough times, something strange happens: the masks begin to speak to each other.1
That’s the beginning of a dialectical sense of self.
When the “thug” part of me whispers to the “nerd” part, I understand toughness differently.
When the “nerd” negotiates with the “writer,” I see how knowledge bends into storytelling.
Each mask gives me a lens.
When you layer enough of them together, you aren’t “losing your authentic self”—you gain additional dimensionality.
This, I think, is how real cultural understanding is born. Maybe even enlightenment?!
Not from clinging to a single “true self,” but from stitching together the dialogue between all the masks you’ve ever worn.
And hopefully, there will be many more.
wearing masks lightly
So no, I wouldn’t change a thing.
Amor Fati, motherfucker.
“Do not kill the part of you that is cringe. Kill the part that cringes.” —the internet.
We strive to wear the mask in full recognition that it is a mask, to know when it’s time to take one off, or swap it out, or let it argue with another part of you until something deeper emerges.
As the OG edge-lord-turned-thought-leader (Nietzsche) reminded us, “Everything profound loves masks.”
Go, and be profound, my friend.
Some part of me will always be the thug itching to throw hands.
Another will always be the nerd grinding through a Dostoyevsky novel I barely understand.
And those are just two masks from my collection.. ;)
Somewhere between those voices—between all the masks—I can almost hear something like wisdom. Or, maybe it’s just the weed gummy kicking in.
Just don’t test me in the comments section. I’m still learning which mask to wear when the gloves come off — but either way, I’ll commit to the bit.
And if you liked this essay, the first installment of The Esoteric Teachings of Max Murphy (my paid newsletter) is dropping soon: a full, unfiltered review of every mask I’ve ever worn — from thug to nerd to writer and beyond. Consider it the extended universe of this piece.
ps: huge shoutout to
for posting to Substack Notes & inspiring this essay. If you value wisdom as much as I pretend to, then you’ll love his newsletter, Escaping Flatland.
Although my therapist has a different term for what’s going on here.
This reminds me of code switching. All of these personas are me and each one, separately, is useful in different situations. I think most of us use these, at least if we move between different societal groups. Now, I can't imagine being clever enough to hold onto one mask long enough for it to become a true persona.
You put the “fun” in profundity, my friend.