When Engagement Becomes Abdication

I open Instagram to “quickly check messages.”

Twenty minutes later I’m standing in the wreckage of my own good intentions, thumb still warm, having handed out a neat stack of likes to people I genuinely care about.

A friend posts a photo dump. I tap through it like I’m clearing an error log. Someone shares a career win. I type “so deserved” because it’s true and because silence feels like leaving a door half-closed. On TikTok I watch six seconds of a video, get the gist, drop a heart like a coin in a jar.

Social maintenance. Keeping the roads from cracking.

Then I put the phone down and feel… not sad, exactly. More like I did a lot of motion without moving anywhere. A mild guilt, too. Not “I should delete my apps.” Smaller. Sharper.

I did not actually show up. I impersonated showing up.

That feeling is the real starting point for authenticity online. Not the filtered selfie problem. Not the personal brand problem. The autopilot problem.

Because once you notice how often you operate on reflex, the word “authenticity” stops sounding like a personality trait and starts sounding like what it really is:

A question about agency.

The like costs nothing. That’s the problem. Link to heading

There’s a term for likes, hearts, favorites, all those one-click gestures: paralinguistic digital affordances. They communicate without words, like nodding or smiling. The research confirms the obvious: one click can carry a mess of meanings. 2

Likes aren’t empty. People use them to signal support, maintain closeness, return favors, end conversations politely without starting them for real. 2 The zombie-mode session isn’t fake. It’s real social behavior adapted to a frictionless landscape.

So why does it feel hollow?

Two reasons that aren’t moralistic.

First: the cost of the gesture is near zero, and the system makes it frictionless to perform without attention. You can be “supportive” while your mind is elsewhere, the way you can “listen” in a meeting while drafting a different email.

Second: most time on these platforms is passive. We scroll, glance, absorb, compare. And passive use correlates with worse well-being. Verduyn and colleagues found that cueing people to use Facebook passively led to declines in affective well-being over time. 1 Other work connects passive social network usage with lower subjective well-being and increased negative social comparison. 4

None of this proves your Tuesday night scroll caused your mood. Humans are messy systems. But the pattern is consistent enough to notice:

When you turn social media into a consumption treadmill, it tends to feel bad. 1

The part that matters for authenticity is this: passive use isn’t just about mood. It’s about how you relate to yourself. When you operate on reflex, you outsource your attention. When you outsource your attention, you start outsourcing your choices.

Not in a dramatic way. In a slow, practical way. Like waking up one day and realizing you’ve been following road signs you never chose.

The problem isn’t performance. It’s abdication. Link to heading

Most authenticity essays start with the curated persona: the highlight reel, the polished mask.

That’s incomplete. Curation is normal. Everyone edits. Offline too. You don’t speak to your dentist the way you speak to your best friend. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s context.

The deeper problem is abdication: the moment you stop being the author of your participation and become a reaction function.

Instagram and TikTok are very good at making you a reaction function.

They offer content pre-sorted by predicted interest. They encourage micro-gestures that let you feel present without the weight of actual presence. They reward speed, certainty, recognizable formats. TikTok in particular is a factory for imitation: same sounds, same cuts, same cadence, cloned at scale with minor variation.

Imitation isn’t automatically bad. It’s how culture works. The trouble starts when imitation becomes your main way of being.

First you hand out quick signals without attention. Then you start outsourcing your opinions the same way, quick alignment without digestion. A feed designed for reaction becomes a life designed for reaction.

You don’t become inauthentic because you imitate. You become inauthentic because you stop owning what the imitation is doing to you.

Three philosophers walk into your feed Link to heading

Existentialists are useful here because they’re not giving you a self-esteem pep talk. They’re handing you a flashlight and pointing it at the part you’d rather not inspect: how often you choose not to choose.

I’ll keep them on a short leash.

Sartre called it bad faith. Not lying to yourself; that makes it sound like a private moral failing. Bad faith is treating yourself like a fixed object so you can dodge the discomfort of freedom.

“I’m just a lurker.” “It’s just how TikTok is.” “This is just what you do here.”

These sentences can be true in a narrow way. They also work as alibis. If you are “just” a thing, you aren’t responsible for how you act. You’re a role. A function. A nervous system in someone else’s system.

On these platforms, bad faith looks like obedience: obedience to trends, to tone, to metrics, to speed. The platform doesn’t force you. It suggests, rewards, repeats. And because you’re tired and human, you comply. You call it engagement. You call it keeping up.

Sartre would call it a choice you’re pretending isn’t a choice.

Kierkegaard warned about the crowd. Not as elitism but as accountability. The crowd dissolves responsibility. In the crowd, nobody is responsible, so nobody has to be real. You can hide inside “what people think” and borrow a stance like a rain jacket.

TikTok is crowd logic with an algorithmic gearbox. When you haven’t developed a position on something, it’s tempting to rent one. Someone posts a hot take, you stitch it with a facial expression. It feels safer than silence. It feels like being on the right side.

Kierkegaard’s warning isn’t “never agree with people.” It’s this: if you let the crowd do your choosing, you lose the muscle that makes you a person instead of a weather vane.

Heidegger called it das Man, the “they.” The they is what “one” does. One checks the feed. One reacts. One stays current. One has takes on everything and ownership of nothing.

The they isn’t evil. It’s the social operating system. You need it to function. The problem is when it becomes your permanent address.

These platforms are habitats for the they-self because they’re optimized for exactly what the they-self wants: ease, social proof, and a constant stream of what matters right now.

So the question becomes concrete: are you using the platform, or is it using you to keep “the they” running through your hands?

That’s not an accusation. It’s a compass check.

Authenticity isn’t “no mask.” It’s a mask you can answer for. Link to heading

Here’s the uncomfortable truth most authenticity discourse avoids: there is no pristine self behind performance.

Humans build selves. We imitate to learn. We borrow language. We try on styles. TikTok just makes the imitation loop visible because it’s built into the mechanics.

If you want a definition that survives contact with that reality:

Authenticity is when your outward behavior is tethered to your inward values strongly enough that you can explain yourself without hiding behind the system.

Not “I always tell the full truth.” Not “I never perform.” Just: I can answer for what I’m doing.

Here’s where virtue ethics earns its keep. Aristotle’s claim is that character is built through repeated action. You become what you practice. Virtue isn’t a mood. It’s a habit you train.

Online authenticity works the same way. It’s not a single brave post. It’s the slow accumulation of choices that make your digital self feel like it belongs to you.

Which brings us to the part the algorithm hates.

The algorithm wants you legible. Authenticity requires being harder to parse. Link to heading

Platforms reward you for being easy to read: a clear niche, a predictable voice, a consistent aesthetic, a stable opinion set, a reliable output schedule.

Great for marketing. Not always great for being a person.

Real humans are inconsistent across contexts. They change their mind. They have seasons. They go quiet. They get interested in things that don’t fit. They don’t always have a take. Sometimes they need time to think.

If you’re building authenticity over time, you will hit a direct conflict: the platform wants you to be a product. You might prefer to be a project.

That’s the rebellious hinge. Once you see the conflict, you can stop treating “what performs” as a verdict on what’s worth doing.

There’s empirical support here. Bailey and colleagues found that more authentic self-expression on social media is associated with greater subjective well-being. 6 That doesn’t mean “post everything.” It doesn’t prove causality. But it suggests that living split, acting unlike yourself because it works, has a cost.

The platform can’t stop you from paying that cost. It can make the bill easy to ignore.

The counterfeit: strategic vulnerability Link to heading

Let’s name the genre that makes everyone feel weird: the vulnerability post that reads like a press release.

You know it when you see it. A confession that lands perfectly. An “imperfection” that conveniently proves competence. A hard story compressed into a clean arc with a takeaway you can screenshot.

This isn’t authenticity. This is performing authenticity. It’s tempting because it resolves the tension, you get to feel real and still win the game.

But there’s a tell. Real vulnerability has consequences. It risks misunderstanding. It creates awkwardness. It makes people back away. It rarely fits a template.

If the vulnerable post feels too clean, it’s not a person letting you in. It’s a person building an identity object.

When you turn your inner life into a commodity, you may get attention, but you risk becoming a stranger to yourself. You start watching from the outside, managing your narrative like a PR intern assigned to your soul.

A more durable approach is less glamorous: keep some parts of your life unrendered. Not because you’re hiding. Because not everything benefits from being content.

Authenticity requires privacy the way thinking requires silence.

The audience isn’t a resource Link to heading

Existentialism can become a mirror maze. So it helps to add ethics that keeps other people from turning into props.

Kant’s rule is blunt: treat people as ends, not merely as means. On these platforms, it’s easy to treat people as means, as an audience to validate you, a resource to harvest attention from, a scorekeeper for your self-worth.

That includes treating yourself that way.

If you’re checking your post’s performance to decide whether you’re allowed to feel good today, you’ve outsourced your dignity to strangers who don’t know your name.

Ubuntu ethics arrives at a similar place: you become a person through other persons. Authenticity isn’t only an inward achievement. It’s relational. The kind of self you become depends on how you show up.

A rule that survives all these traditions: if your online life makes other people less real to you, it will also make you less real to yourself.

That’s not poetry. It’s system behavior.

Three checks for when the feed turns foggy Link to heading

I won’t give you a tidy checklist. That genre is oversupplied. Here are three checks I use when I notice I’m sliding into autopilot. Try one. Ignore the rest. The goal is to become harder to steer.

Like fewer things. Look longer. If you’re liking posts you didn’t really see, don’t moralize. Just notice: you’re paying social taxes with counterfeit currency. Try a small rebellion, like less, look more. This sounds trivial. It’s also a direct strike against the platform’s optimization target, which is quantity of engagement, not quality of attention. How you use the platform matters. 1 Attention is the substrate of experience. If you’re not giving it, you’re not there.

Ask what you wanted. After you react with a like, a quick comment, or a stitch, ask: what did I want from that? Not in a therapy way. In a systems-debugging way. Common answers are instructive: I wanted to be seen as supportive. I wanted to maintain a relationship without the time cost. I wanted to signal I’m still in the group. I wanted to avoid the discomfort of silence. These aren’t sins. They are motivations. And motivations are the levers the system uses. Once you can name your lever, you can stop pretending it doesn’t exist.

Keep an unposted body of work. Have a place where you write, think, sketch, draft, without publishing. Build a private body of work. Not to be mysterious. To make sure you still have a self that isn’t shaped in public. People talk about “finding their voice.” A better phrase is earning your voice. That takes private iteration. It also protects you from crisis-loop habits. Sharma and colleagues describe doomscrolling as persistent attention to negative information about crises and disasters. 8 If your mind is always saturated with other people’s emergencies, it’s harder to hear your own signal. A private body of work keeps your signal alive.

What authenticity looks like over time Link to heading

This isn’t productivity advice. It’s architecture. You’re building a room the platform can’t enter.

If you do the above long enough, something shifts. You stop feeling obligated to react to everything. You stop needing a take on every prompt the feed throws. You start posting less like a weather report and more like a person building a perspective.

That’s the confidence piece.

The rebellious piece is simpler: you become less legible to the algorithm. You pause longer. You respond slower. You care about different things. You stop optimizing for the platform’s idea of “good.”

This doesn’t mean you become obscure or boring. It means you become harder to manipulate.

Somewhere in this process, the zombie-mode guilt softens. Not because you never like anything. Because when you do, it’s attached to attention. When you comment, it’s attached to thought. When you speak, it’s attached to something you’ve earned.

Authenticity becomes less about “being real” and more about being responsible for what you’re doing with your life energy in public.

One last question, then. Not a test. Just an instrument panel.

When you leave Instagram or TikTok, do you feel more like an author, or more like an employee?

If the answer is employee, the fix is rarely a grand exit. It’s small acts of authorship, repeated until they’re normal.

That’s the whole game.