Retiring the Word "Authentic"

Not long ago, in a queue at a local bakery, I heard someone say, quite sincerely, “Their croissants are so authentic.” She said it like you’d compliment a really good wine or a friend who always tells it like it is. A few nods followed, murmurs of agreement, and then the word hung in the air like steam...

“Authentic” is everywhere. It appears on café menus beside descriptions of sourdough. It’s in job interviews, "I try to be my most authentic self at work". It twirls through social captions and dating profiles, a kind of catch-all reassurance that we mean what we say and are who we post.

It’s not a bad word. In fact, it’s rather a good one, rooted in the idea of truth, of being genuine. But lately, its overuse has made it feel more like a slogan than a principle. Somewhere along the way, authenticity became something to perform rather than possess.

There was a time, I think, when the word served as a gentle rebellion. Against filtered perfection and corporate polish, it felt radical to post a messy kitchen, to admit uncertainty, to wear something a little rumpled. The word cropped up around the same time we collectively tired of gloss, when curated became a dirty word and storytelling replaced advertising. And so “authentic” arrived, earnest and earthy, with its sleeves rolled up.

But the thing about words that promise virtue is that they rarely hold their shape under pressure. "Authentic" has become a kind of shorthand for honesty, but too often it signals the opposite, a calculated transparency, a vulnerability rehearsed.

I’ve found myself craving another word. One with less shine. One that allows room for contradiction and change. Lately, at TILTED we’ve been leaning toward “honest.” Not as a performance but as a posture. Honesty doesn't need to look good. It allows for silence, for I-don’t-know-yet, for mid-sentence backtracking. Where authenticity often demands a finished identity, this is who I am, take it or leave it, honesty lets us speak with clarity, even when the story is still unfolding.

Perhaps what we mean when we say we want something "authentic" is simply that we want it to be real, but not in a performative way. Real as in flawed, evolving, strange, unfiltered. Real as in truthful, even when that truth is incomplete.

So here’s to retiring “authentic,” at least for a little while. Let it rest. Let it slip quietly into the language of things we once needed urgently but have since outgrown. And let us listen closely, and show up, honestly, if not always authentically.