You've heard it a thousand times: just be yourself. It sounds simple, even liberating. But when you try to act on this advice, something strange happens—you realize you don't know what 'yourself' actually is. Are you your feelings? Your habits? The person others expect you to be?

The existentialists took this confusion seriously. For thinkers like Sartre, Heidegger, and de Beauvoir, authenticity wasn't about finding some hidden true self and letting it shine. It was something far more demanding—and far more uncomfortable. Authenticity meant confronting the terrifying fact that there is no predetermined self to discover.

What emerges from their analysis is a concept of authenticity that has almost nothing to do with self-expression workshops or personality tests. It's about how you relate to your own existence, your choices, and the weight of being the author of your own life. This understanding doesn't make life easier. But it does make it more honest.

Popular authenticity tells you to follow your feelings, express your personality, and ignore what others think. It assumes you have a fixed inner nature waiting to be revealed—like a statue inside marble, needing only to be freed. The existentialists rejected this entirely.

For them, the self isn't something you have but something you do. You don't possess a nature that determines who you are. Instead, you exist first, and through your choices, you create whatever self you become. This is Sartre's famous claim that existence precedes essence. A hammer has an essence—it was designed to hammer. You weren't designed for anything.

This means 'being yourself' can't mean expressing some pre-given identity. That identity doesn't exist until you create it. The pop-psychology version of authenticity often becomes another form of evasion: 'I'm just an anxious person' or 'I'm not the type who takes risks.' These statements treat personality as fate, using a fictional fixed self to avoid responsibility for choices.

Existentialist authenticity starts with accepting that you are radically free—that no feeling, no past, no personality type actually compels your next choice. Your anger doesn't make you yell. Your shyness doesn't make you stay home. You choose, and then you tell a story about why you had no choice. Authenticity means dropping that story.

Takeaway

Whenever you catch yourself saying 'I'm just not that kind of person,' pause—you're describing choices you've made, not facts about your nature.

If authenticity isn't self-expression, what is it? At its core, it's a particular relationship to your own freedom and the responsibility that comes with it. The authentic person doesn't flee from the fact that they are the author of their life.

This sounds inspiring until you feel its weight. Being the author means you can't ultimately blame your choices on your upbringing, your circumstances, your culture, or your emotions. These factors influence you, certainly. But the existentialist insight is that you always could choose otherwise—and you know it. The anxiety this produces is not a bug but a feature. It's the feeling of freedom.

Most of us spend enormous energy avoiding this anxiety. Sartre called this bad faith—the self-deception of pretending we're not free. We say 'I had to' when we mean 'I chose to.' We blame necessity where there was only preference. We hide behind roles—employee, parent, citizen—as if they dictated our actions rather than being frameworks we continually choose to inhabit.

Authentic existence means sitting with the discomfort of knowing that your life is your doing. Not in a self-help 'you create your reality' sense, but in a starker way: even in terrible circumstances, you choose your response. Viktor Frankl, surviving concentration camps, drew similar conclusions. The last freedom—the one that cannot be taken—is how you meet what happens to you.

Takeaway

Authenticity isn't feeling good about yourself—it's accepting the uncomfortable truth that you are responsible for who you become, even when circumstances are not your fault.

Here's where many people get authenticity wrong: they treat it as a destination. Find your true self, and you're done. Achieve authenticity, and you can relax. But for existentialists, authenticity is not a state you reach—it's a way of existing that must be renewed with every choice.

You cannot be authentic the way you can be tall. You can only exist authentically, moment to moment, by continually acknowledging your freedom and taking responsibility for your choices. Yesterday's authentic choice doesn't make today's automatic. The project starts over each morning.

This is actually liberating, though it doesn't feel that way at first. It means you're never trapped by past failures of authenticity. Every moment offers another opportunity to stop fleeing, to stop blaming, to stop hiding behind roles and excuses. But it also means you can never coast. The temptation toward bad faith is permanent because freedom is genuinely uncomfortable.

De Beauvoir emphasized that authentic existence is also relational. You don't build a self in isolation. Your freedom is entangled with others' freedom; your choices affect what's possible for them. Authentic existence therefore isn't just self-focused—it involves acknowledging others as free beings too, rather than treating them as objects or obstacles in your personal drama.

Takeaway

Stop waiting to 'find yourself' and start recognizing that every choice you make, right now, is an act of self-creation—whether you acknowledge it or not.

Existentialist authenticity offers no comfort and no easy answers. It replaces the soothing myth of a hidden true self with the demanding reality of ongoing self-creation. It asks you to feel the weight of your freedom rather than pretending it away.

This isn't cruelty—it's respect. The existentialists believed that human beings are capable of facing this truth, even when it produces anxiety. They trusted that honest existence, however difficult, is preferable to comfortable self-deception.

To live authentically is to stop waiting for permission, stop blaming circumstances, and stop treating your identity as settled. It's to recognize that the question 'Who am I?' can only ever be answered by what you do next.