The Authentic Asshole
There Are Two Kinds Of Authenticity. One Makes You Harder To Be Around. The Other Makes You Impossible To Forget.
Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I've used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade.
I had a college roommate who used to end every conversation the same way.
Someone would tell him his tone was too sharp, or that the thing he said at dinner landed wrong, or that he’d cut them off three times in twenty minutes. And he would shrug and say some version of the same sentence. “That’s just me. Take it or leave it. I’m just being authentic.”
Eventually I stopped engaging with him. Not dramatically. I just felt better around people who took the effort to consider others, read the room and not project their needs and assumptions on to others.
I think about him every time I hear someone use the word authenticity now. Because somewhere in the last decade, a word that was supposed to mean something respectable started meaning something else. It started meaning permission to be selfish, rude and closed off to growth.
The Part Nobody Says Out Loud
Authenticity has become the most misused word in personal development. Not because people don’t care about it. Because they’ve been sold a version of it that quietly wrecks their relationships and then blames everyone else for the damage.
Here’s the version they’ve been sold. Being authentic means saying whatever you feel, whenever you feel it, without cleaning it up. Cleaning it up is fake. The real you is the uncleaned-up you.
Or it means, “I can engage with you however I want and if you have an issue you can just communicate that to me.”
Here’s what that actually produces. A whole generation of people who can’t tell the difference between being real and being rude. From being honest and being off-putting. Who wear their inability to read a room like a badge. Who say whatever they want and then act surprised when everyone around them feels worse and begins to avoid them. These people don’t have a lot of friends and they believe it is because of the friends.
The authentic asshole is not a rare person. The authentic asshole is someone who has confused saying what they feel with knowing who they are. They are everywhere. Including, sometimes, in the mirror.
Which Self Are You Being Loyal To?
Here’s the first problem with the popular idea of authenticity. It doesn’t tell you which version of yourself you’re supposed to be loyal to.
Because there are a lot of versions.
There’s the eighteen year old you who thought he knew everything and was terrified of being seen. There’s the wounded you who learned to shut down because shutting down was the safest thing when you were seven. There’s the current you, who is still figuring things out, still carrying stuff from childhood that has nothing to do with who you actually are underneath.
Being authentic to any of those versions means staying loyal to a self that was built under pressure. It means pledging allegiance to your conditioning. And your conditioning, most of the time, is not you. It’s what happened to you.
In the Next Level Human framework I call the deepest self essentia. It’s made of three things. Your essential nature, which is the part of you underneath all the conditioning. Your earned wisdom, which is what you learned from pain you actually faced and worked through. And your free will, which is the purpose you choose to aim your life at.
Essentia is not your past self. It is not even your current self. It’s the version of you that shows up when you’ve done the work to see through your patterns and you’re aiming your life at something bigger than your own comfort.
That’s the only self worth being loyal to.
So the question isn’t “am I being my authentic self?” The question is “which self am I being authentic to, and is that self hindering my growth or enhancing it?”
This is what the authenticity zealot doesn’t see. Whatever self you stay loyal to becomes your ceiling. If I’m loyal to my current self, my current self is where I stop. If I’m loyal to my wounded self, my wounded self is where I stop. The only version of me worth pledging to is the one I’m still becoming.
Think about it this way. How many of us would actually want to stay loyal to who we were at eighteen? Or the version of us that was hurting the most? That’s the version the authenticity zealot is protecting. He calls it being real. It’s actually being stuck.
Saying It vs. Saying It Well
There’s a version of authenticity that actually works. And the difference between it and the false version comes down to a simple idea most people have never heard put this way.
What you mean is one thing. How you say it is another.
The what stays the same. That’s your values, your truth, what you actually see and believe. That part doesn’t move. When I teach a room full of coaches, what I actually think about the world is exactly the same as what I think when I’m with my oldest friends.
The how is totally different. When I’m out with my best friends, I curse. I make jokes that would get me fired from any teaching gig. I use shock value. I can be crass and inappropriate in ways that are funny to them and only them. When I step into a room to teach, I put that away. Not because it’s fake. Because those people are there to learn, not to laugh at my worst jokes.
I am not being dishonest when I talk differently in those two rooms. I’m being considerate. What I believe is the same in both places. How I deliver it is not.
The authentic asshole can’t tell those two things apart. He thinks if he changes how he talks at all, he’s lying. So he talks to his mother the way he talks to his drinking buddies. He gives feedback to a coworker the way he’d trash talk a rival at the game. He walks into every room and refuses to adjust, because in his head, adjusting is faking.
It isn’t. Adjusting is paying attention. It’s the thing you do when you actually care about whether the other person can receive what you’re saying.
What he calls being real is really just a refusal to notice the other person is there.
The Research Nobody Wants To Quote
There’s a line of research on this that doesn’t get talked about much, probably because it cuts against the popular story.
A psychologist named Mark Snyder started studying something he called self-monitoring back in the 1970s. The short version is this. Some people pay attention to the room they’re in and adjust how they show up. Other people don’t. They act the same way no matter who they’re with or what the situation is. The people who don’t adjust feel more real to themselves. They feel more authentic. But when you look at how their lives actually go over time, the picture is different. They have more friction in their relationships, weaker networks, and tend not to rise into leadership roles. The thing that feels like integrity from the inside looks like something else from the outside.
There’s also research from Emma Levine on what happens when people pride themselves on being brutally honest. The finding is almost funny when you read it. People who describe themselves as brutally honest are often seen by other people as less honest, not more. Because the brutality reads as aggression. And once someone feels attacked, they stop listening. The message doesn’t land. Which means the brutally honest person, the one who thinks they’re the only one willing to tell the truth, is actually worse at getting the truth across than the person who takes a second to consider how to say it.
And then there’s a whole body of work on something called psychological entitlement. People who score high on it tend to describe their inconsiderate behavior as authenticity. The word becomes the cover. It lets them skip over the part where they’d have to look at the behavior honestly.
None of this is an argument for being a people pleaser. I’ve been a clinician long enough to know most of the damage people do to themselves comes from editing too much, not too little. But there’s a difference between adjusting how you say something and abandoning what you meant to say. The authentic asshole can’t tell those two things apart. He thinks any time you adjust how you talk, you’re faking it.
You’re not. You’re just paying attention.
The Selfish Part Nobody Names
Here’s the move a Next Level Human makes that the authentic asshole doesn’t. A Next Level Human thinks about themselves and the person in front of them at the same time.
This isn’t a compromise. It’s not “I want to be real but I also have to manage how people feel.” That framing still puts you in the center and treats everyone else as a hassle.
The real move is different. You are not just a person. You are a person in relationship with other people. Your essentia shows up in contact with them, not in isolation from them. Which means the other person isn’t a problem to work around. They’re part of what your authenticity is even for.
When I teach, the room isn’t an obstacle to me being real. The room is the whole reason I’m being real in the first place. Reading that room, meeting those people where they are, figuring out how to say the thing so they can actually take it in... that is me being real. Fully. Not partially.
The authentic asshole has collapsed all of that into a solo act. He thinks being real is about him feeling real. Whether anyone else can actually take in what he’s saying is not his concern. And when they start pulling back, he blames them for not being able to handle him.
The truth is usually simpler. They could handle him. They just stopped wanting to.
And this is the selfish part nobody names. The authentic asshole assumes he knows how he’s landing on other people. He doesn’t. How could he? He isn’t inside their head. But he acts like he is. He decides he’s being misunderstood, decides the other person is too sensitive, decides everyone else is the problem. It’s a whole life built on assumptions about people he never actually asked.
There Are Always Consequences
Here’s a thing that gets left out of the authenticity conversation a lot. Being real has consequences. Even the good kind of being real. Even essentia-level real.
Say I decided my authentic self wanted to walk around naked all the time. That was just me. The ABCs of who I am, take it or leave it. Fine. I’m allowed to believe that about myself. But my neighbors are going to call me a freak. I’m going to get arrested. I’m going to scare kids. Those are consequences of my choice, and they don’t go away because I label the choice authentic.
Every act of self-expression lands somewhere. Other people have to absorb it. And if I keep expressing myself in ways that cost the people around me, at some point they stop showing up. That’s not them being fragile. That’s them being tired.
This is the piece the authentic asshole has found a way to dodge. He gets to say whatever he wants, and the people around him pay the price in hurt feelings, strained friendships, awkward rooms. He calls that courage. It isn’t courage. It’s a bill other people are paying so he doesn’t have to grow.
Real authenticity costs the person being authentic. If there’s no cost to you, you’re probably not being real. You’re just being loud.
The Brave Part Is Not What You Think
None of this is an argument against being willing to be disliked. Real honesty costs something. If you’re actually living in line with who you are, there are going to be people who can’t follow you there. There are going to be rooms where you’re the friction. There are going to be conversations where you say the thing nobody else will say, and you’ll lose the room, and you’ll be right to have said it anyway.
That takes real guts. You can’t skip it. The nice version of being considerate, the one that avoids every hard conversation, is not the good version. That’s just a prettier kind of hiding.
But here’s what people miss. The brave part is saying the hard thing at all. Not saying it rudely. Those are two different moves, and people mix them up all the time.
Anyone can be rude. There’s nothing brave about it. What’s brave is telling someone something they don’t want to hear in a way they can actually hear it. That’s harder than being rude. That takes work.
Most authentic assholes have the whole thing backwards. They think being blunt and unfiltered is the brave part. So they skip the work. They deliver hard truths in ways that guarantee the other person can’t take them in. And then they pat themselves on the back for having had the guts to say it.
The guts weren’t in how you said it. The guts were in saying it at all. The care was in how.
What To Actually Do
So here’s the shift. A Next Level Human knows two things the authentic asshole hasn’t figured out yet.
One. The version of yourself you’re being loyal to should be the one you’re becoming, not the one you already are. Especially not the one you were.
Two. Being real is something you do with other people, not at them. The room is part of the work.
In practice, this looks like a few things.
It looks like changing how you talk without changing what you mean. You can be different in different rooms without being fake. Pay attention. Adjust how you deliver it. Keep the truth underneath the same.
It looks like asking yourself, before you say the hard thing, whether you want it to actually land or whether you just want to feel righteous. Those are not the same goal. If you want it to land, you’ll deliver it with enough care that the person can take it in. If you just want to feel righteous, you’ll deliver it in a way that makes sure they can’t.
It looks like noticing which self you’re defending when you say “that’s just who I am.” If the behavior you’re defending is costing you relationships, opportunities, real connection... that’s not who you are. That’s who you haven’t grown past yet. The question is whether the self you’re protecting is the real you or the scared you. Those are different. One is worth being loyal to. The other is the thing that needs updating.
And it looks like taking the hit when your honesty costs something. Real authenticity costs the honest person. If you can only be honest by making other people pay for it, you haven’t learned to be honest yet. You’ve just learned to be loud and call it courage.
The Part That Stays With You
My old college roommate never figured this out. Or maybe he did and I’m not in his life to see it. That’s possible too.
What I know is this. Somewhere along the way he decided that the rough, unfiltered version of himself at twenty was the real him. And anything that asked him to grow past that version felt like a threat. He was loyal to a self that was never supposed to be the final version of him.
Essentia isn’t where you start. It’s where you’re going. And getting there means you have to keep asking yourself, in every hard conversation, which version of you is running the show. And whether that version is worth defending.
The authentic asshole says “this is just me. Like it or leave it.”
The Next Level Human says “this is who I’m becoming. And I want you to be part of it. So let me figure out how to say this in a way you can actually hear.”
One of those sentences ends conversations. The other one starts them.
PS: If you’re tired of the same friction showing up in your relationships and you’re ready to become the kind of person who can hold their truth without breaking the people around them, explore my Next Level Human coaching program today. Spots are limited... don’t wait. 👉 http://www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coaching
References:
Snyder, M. (1974). Self‑monitoring of expressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30(4), 526–537.
Snyder, M. (1987). Public appearances/private realities: The psychology of self‑monitoring. W. H. Freeman.
Levine, E. E., Roberts, B. W., & Cohen, T. R. (2020). When the truth hurts: The consequences of honesty in everyday life. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(5), 898–920.
Levine, E. E. (2018). Mispredicting the consequences of honesty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(9), 1400–1429.
Campbell, W. K., Bonacci, A. M., Shelton, J., Exline, J. J., & Bushman, B. J. (2004). Psychological entitlement: Interpersonal consequences and validation of a self‑report measure. Journal of Personality Assessment, 83(1), 29–45.
Grubbs, J. B., Exline, J. J., & Twenge, J. M. (2025). Advances in research and adaptive expressions of entitlement. Current Opinion in Psychology, 56, 101763.
This is profound I took so much away with me from this article thank you.
Jade, using authenticity as a shield to avoid the friction of personal growth is the defining failure of modern self-help. People have convinced themselves that adapting their delivery to their environment is somehow fake, rather than basic cognitive calibration. If your "true self" requires everyone else to constantly lower their standards, you aren't authentic; you are simply rigid. This is a brilliant distillation of the actual psychology.
Dr Tom Kane