Nothing Is Real. So Why Are You So Mad?
We've been lying to each other online for twenty years.
The vacation that looked effortless took three hours to stage. The kitchen renovation was shot from the one angle that hid the chaos. The body that stopped your scroll was smoothed, stretched, and filtered into something that doesn't exist in any mirror. And then there's our careers. The project you briefly touched became something you "led." The meeting you sat in became a "strategic initiative." LinkedIn is a collectively maintained fiction that everyone has agreed, without discussion, to take seriously.
We built entire industries around all of this and called it authentic.
We're not mourning authenticity. We've been fine without it for years.
Now AI can fabricate an image in seconds and we're in crisis. Some of that alarm is legitimate — the job losses are real, the economic disruption is real, and those consequences deserve serious attention. But that's not what most of the noise is about. The loudest voices tend to belong to people who've spent a decade carefully constructing a version of themselves that has almost nothing to do with their actual life. The outrage is real. The standing to have it is less clear.
Here's what I think is actually going on. The filtered selfie is still a real person. There's a human being behind it with real skin and real consequences — embarrassment, relationships, a body they actually live in. The inflated LinkedIn bio, however exaggerated, still connects to someone who showed up somewhere and did something. The lie has a face attached to it.
AI removes that entirely. No accountability. No one home. That's what's genuinely unsettling, even if most people can't name it. It's not that AI is so different from what we were already doing. It's that it's the logical conclusion of it — and it arrived without asking permission.
We're not mourning authenticity. We've been fine without it for years. What we're mourning is the last thin thread connecting the performance to a real person. AI cuts that thread completely.
So maybe the honest conversation isn't about AI at all. It's about what we already gave away, quietly, one filtered photo and one exaggerated job title at a time — and why we only noticed when the machine finished the job we started.
