#72 When status replaced dreams
Why it is not a solution for authenticity
“Don’t be yourself” - this is a title of the latest book by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, and I hope it becomes a NYT bestseller.
He is that charismatic Argentinian organizational psychologist who got famous through his work “Why do so many incompetent men become leaders?” A rare book whose title makes its own argument.
In his new one, Chamorro-Premuzic talks about the same ideas that I covered in “#70 How to be free without being intolerable”, so I’ll skip the review and focus only on one thought he shared in a podcast:
“The irony is that authenticity is a privilege for the elite. If you have a lot of power, you can indulge.”
This single observation explains why status exerts such gravitational pull: not for its comforts but for the fantasy that one day, once we have enough status, we can finally be ourselves, as though authenticity were a luxury accessory you could buy once you’d earned the right kind of life.
The reality is not that simple, though.
Let’s start with dreams
As children, we dream freely because we have no concept of consequence. Then social conditioning kicks in. For example, by age five, girls encounter the first “dream gap,” that moment when the world politely suggests their ambitions might be… excessive. This gap happens due to the biases embedded in families and societies.
Adults, however, confront a second gap: quieter, far more durable. It’s when the question shifts from “What do I want?” to “What will be rewarded?”
The tragedy isn’t that dreams die. It’s that most people don’t notice the switch. They call it “maturity.” The second dream gap happens when every choice starts being measured in social ROI. You simply begin optimizing your existence the way you optimize a LinkedIn headline: carefully enough that no one can accuse you of wanting the wrong thing.
The trap of that moment of switch
This important decision point often occurs when the perceived “cost” of being yourself outweighs its potential “returns.” The moment is rarely dramatic. It’s the first time you disappoint someone important to you and feel the sting of their disapproval. We talk a great deal about resilience, but the truth is that some people never fully bounce back from that first big social penalty.
This is where many people take a critical wrong turn. Instead of learning how to remain themselves while navigating the preferences, sensitivities, and occasional oddities of others, they opt for the simpler solution: blending. It feels safer, after all, to edit yourself out of the story than to risk another raised eyebrow.
Chamorro-Premuzic makes an important point in his latest book, and I wrote about it in newsletter #70: authenticity doesn’t require self-sabotage. It just requires finesse.
This is a critical nuance.
The task isn’t to abandon what matters to us in favor of the most broadly approved ideas. It’s to learn the strategies that allow us to live according to our values without burning every bridge within a five-kilometer radius.
A strangely liberating truth: you don’t need permission to be yourself, but you do need skill.
The identity outsourcing
The seduction of status, though, is that it is the most efficient form of social coordination. It’s a ready-made value system you can download without having to examine your own preferences, which, if we’re being honest, are often inconvenient, poorly formatted, and require a lot more effort to live with.
Instead of conducting your own due diligence on meaning, you simply adopt the market consensus. It spares you the awkwardness of wanting something that can’t be explained succinctly at a dinner party.
With time, you become adept at producing the version of yourself that elicits minimal raised eyebrows. Eventually, you forget that there was an earlier draft, one that didn’t prioritize smooth edges and public comprehension.
The cost? Your imagination is traded for convenience. The more polished you become, the more interesting parts go missing: curiosity, eccentricity, experiments that have no guaranteed ROI, all quietly disappear.
But optimized assets rarely innovate.
The emotional cost
Eventually, you become a person who can navigate social hierarchies but not your own internal landscape. It takes so much conformity to climb the ladder that, by the time you reach the top, you’ve misplaced most of your original coordinates anyway.
Once you’ve outsourced your definition of success long enough, the idea of defining it yourself feels strangely destabilizing: like being handed back the steering wheel after years of passive navigation. You’re still in motion, but now you realize you have no internal map, and Waze is unhelpfully silent.
Meanwhile, the romantic myth that elites are “authentic” collapses under scrutiny.
What looks like fearless self-expression is often just consequence-proof behavior: when nothing can truly go wrong for you, being “yourself” becomes a risk-free experiment.
This is not authenticity, this is simply bulldozing people with your views, all while using your status to silence those who disagree. I won’t deny, it can be very efficient, as any violent approach is, but do you want to be that person though?
Authenticity, if it’s to mean anything at all, requires the possibility of loss. It means you are willing to allocate resources in alignment with your values, even when the market doesn’t reward it. It’s self-governance.
The type of wealth that we all should be striving for is the ability to disappoint others without destabilizing your sense of self.
Remember, most adulthood is learning that disappointing people is actually survivable.
Micro-divergences
The end of the year is approaching, and this edition could be interpreted as a push to start living your full-on authentic life on January 1st.
I beg you, if you want to reclaim even a small fragment of yourself, don’t start with grand reinventions. Those radical turns rarely happen without major friction.
Start with tiny, barely noticeable deviations. Do something you wouldn’t mention in public. Spend time on an activity with no performance value.
These tiny acts are the antidote to internalized status. They rebuild the muscle of desire, the one that status slowly erases. They reintroduce volatility, variation, and freedom into a life that has become too efficient to be joyful.
And they slowly rebuild the part of you that knows how to want something for reasons that can’t be summarized in bullet points.
Until next time,
Nat
📺 To watch:
“Don’t Be Yourself?” Rethinking Authenticity at Work with Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic - a 1h podcast interview if you want to learn more about the book
Why do so many incompetent men become leaders? - his TED talk, with my favorite quote being: “Being unaware of your limitations increases the chances of becoming a boss”.
📚 To read:
Don’t Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead) - the book itself.
A quote from the Amazon description:
”Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic reveals an uncomfortable truth: our obsession with authenticity is backfiring. From Silicon Valley’s authenticity worship to failed diversity programs, he exposes how our fixation on our “true selves” undermines both individual and organizational success.The most successful people aren’t those who rigidly “stay true to themselves.” They’re the ones who adapt and evolve, largely by paying a great deal of attention to how others see them and adjusting their behavior to the requirements of each situation. The evidence is clear: when we focus less on expressing our authentic selves and more on understanding others, we become better humans.”