There’s a man in Tokyo who spent twenty years becoming a lawyer because his father was a lawyer. He makes excellent money. He hates every morning. When asked why he doesn’t quit, he looks genuinely confused. “But this is what I do,” he says. “This is who I am.”
No, it isn’t. But he’s not alone in the confusion.
The philosopher Charles Taylor called it “the malaise of modernity.” We have more freedom to choose our identities than any generation in human history, yet we feel less authentic than ever. We can be anything, so we become what we think we should be. We mistake the life we’re supposed to want for the life we actually want.
The mechanism is subtle. It starts young. A child shows aptitude for math, so adults praise the math, ignore the poetry. The child learns: I am the math person. By the time they’re selecting a major, the choice feels inevitable. By the time they’re miserable in their career, it feels too late.
But the pressure doesn’t only come from parents and teachers. It comes from everywhere. Instagram tells us what happiness looks like. LinkedIn tells us what success means. Dating apps tell us what’s attractive. We absorb these messages without noticing, then wonder why our lives feel like bad costumes.
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had a concept called “bad faith.” It’s when we pretend we have no choice in order to avoid the anxiety of freedom. The lawyer in Tokyo is in bad faith. So is the influencer who claims she has to post constantly. So is anyone who says “I have no choice” about a situation they’ve chosen to remain in.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of us are in bad faith about something. We’re living according to scripts we never agreed to read. We’re pursuing goals we inherited rather than selected. We’re being selves that someone else designed.
The way out isn’t easy. It requires what Sartre called “radical freedom,” the recognition that we’re responsible for who we become. It means asking difficult questions. Not “What am I good at?” but “What do I love?” Not “What should I want?” but “What do I actually want?” Not “Who am I supposed to be?” but “Who would I be if nobody was watching?”
These questions are terrifying because they remove our excuses. If we’re free to choose, we’re also responsible for our choices. If we’re unhappy, we can’t blame our circumstances. We have to change them.
Some people never ask these questions. They sleep walk through lives that look impressive on paper but feel empty in practice. They die having never lived as themselves.
Others ask too late. They wake up at fifty, sixty, seventy and realize they’ve been living someone else’s dream. They panic. They blow up their lives. They hurt people. They confuse authenticity with selfishness.
The lucky ones ask early and often. They check in with themselves regularly. They notice when they’re drifting off script. They course-correct before the gap between who they are and who they’re pretending to be becomes unbridgeable.
The question isn’t whether you’re living someone else’s life. You probably are, at least partially. We all are. The question is whether you’re willing to notice, and what you’re going to do about it.