Lessons of Living Authentically from Heidegger and Existentialists

“Authenticity” has become a buzzword, hollowed out by self-help books, corporate branding, and influencer culture.

But if you’ve spent time with Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard, or even Nietzsche, you know authenticity isn’t about being quirky or “true to yourself” in a superficial way. It’s about being, about what it means to exist without hiding behind the convenient scripts society hands us.

In this piece, I want to go back to Heidegger’s idea of “Das Man” (the They) and unpack how existential thinkers challenge us to live more honestly—not by chasing ideals, but by confronting our own finitude.

Even if you know these texts well, I think there’s still something new to dig into here, especially when we consider how algorithmic culture and identity performance are reshaping what it means to not live authentically.

The Trap of “The They” – How We Lose Ourselves Without Noticing

We all know the basics: in Being and Time, Heidegger describes “Das Man” (the They) as the anonymous collective that dictates the norms of everyday life. But here’s the thing—we often treat this as a purely social phenomenon, like peer pressure on steroids. I think that’s too narrow.

What Heidegger’s actually doing is much deeper. He’s pointing to a structural mode of being—a way Dasein discloses itself to the world by default. It’s not about being brainwashed or following trends. It’s about not owning up to the fact that you’re the one making choices, even when you think you’re just going along for the ride.

Why “the They” isn’t your enemy

It’s easy to villainize “the They” as some existential bogeyman. But remember: Heidegger explicitly says in §27 that the “they-self” isn’t evil or a moral failure. It’s the way Dasein typically exists. It’s how meaning becomes publicly available. Without it, there’s no shared world.

But—and this is crucial—Das Man levels down possibility. It tells you how people usually do things, what’s acceptable, what’s normal. And in doing so, it removes the anxiety of deciding for yourself. Think of it as a kind of existential gravity: it pulls you into a mode of being where you don’t have to take responsibility for being the one who acts. You just “do what one does.”

Modern examples: It’s not just groupthink

Let me give you a few examples that go beyond the usual “peer pressure” stuff:

Auto-play culture: Think of how Netflix queues up the next episode before you decide whether you want to keep watching. This is a small thing, but it’s exactly the kind of technological expression of Das Man that quietly overrides your agency.
AI recommendations: Spotify, TikTok, Google Maps—they all suggest things based on aggregated patterns. And when we follow them uncritically, we’re living through proxy. These algorithms are the new “They.” They’re not authoritarian, they’re frictionless.
LinkedIn professionalism: Ever notice how every profile sounds the same? “Passionate, driven, collaborative.” It’s not a conspiracy—it’s Das Man writing your resume for you.

In each of these cases, you’re still “free,” but you’re exercising that freedom in a pre-interpreted, pre-packaged way.

What does this mean for authenticity?

Authenticity, then, doesn’t mean rejecting the crowd in some angsty, romantic way. It means realizing that you’re always already immersed in “the They”, and then deciding anyway. You reclaim your thrownness. Heidegger calls this “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit), which is really about owning the structure of your facticity rather than trying to escape it.

And here’s the twist that often gets missed: authenticity isn’t about being “original”. It’s about retrieving possibilities that were already there in your situation, but hidden under the flattening influence of everydayness.

A quick note on language and misunderstanding

I think we’ve also misunderstood the tone of Heidegger here. The “they-self” isn’t just a flaw to overcome. It’s the ground zero of existence. As Hubert Dreyfus reminds us, inauthenticity is not a fall. It’s the starting point. So the goal isn’t to transcend “the They” once and for all—it’s to move in and out of it consciously.

So What Is Authenticity Anyway? (It’s Not Just “Being Yourself”)

If you ask ten philosophy students what Heidegger means by “authenticity,” at least seven will say something like, “It’s about being true to yourself.” And that’s not entirely wrong—but it’s also dangerously reductive. Heidegger’s concept of Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) isn’t about self-expression or inner truth. It’s not psychological. It’s ontological—a way of being.

To really grasp it, we’ve got to dig into three interwoven ideas: thrownness, resoluteness, and being-toward-death. Together, these give us a radically different picture of what it means to live authentically.

Authenticity isn’t freedom from limits—it’s owning your limits

Let’s start with Geworfenheit, or “thrownness.” This is Heidegger’s reminder that we never begin life as blank slates. We’re always already situated: born into a world with a language, history, culture, family, body, and economic structure. You don’t choose these things—but they define the possibilities you can act on.

A lot of modern discussions of authenticity treat it like some kind of self-invention: “You can be anything!” But Heidegger flips this. For him, authenticity isn’t about escaping your situation—it’s about reclaiming it. You don’t invent a new self from scratch; you confront the fact that you are thrown into being, and then you respond to that fact with resoluteness.

Resoluteness is about choosing without guarantees

So what does resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) actually mean? It’s not about finding the “right” answer or the “correct” path. It’s about committing to a possibility in full awareness that it comes from your finite, thrown situation—and that it could always be otherwise.

Inauthentic life tries to delay or diffuse decision—“Let’s see what happens,” “I’ll go with the flow,” “Everyone says this is the best route.” Authentic life, by contrast, says: “I know this is fragile and uncertain. I choose it anyway.”

This is where Heidegger parts ways with someone like Sartre. Sartre puts a lot of weight on radical freedom—his existentialism famously claims we are “condemned to be free.” But Heidegger’s freedom is much more structured. You’re free within your thrownness. You don’t make meaning out of nothing; you recover it from the possibilities that already belong to your historical and cultural situation.

And that’s why authenticity isn’t a personality trait—it’s a mode of temporal existence.

Death as the lens that brings authenticity into focus

Now we get to the big one: being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode). And here’s where most people either lose patience or lean in hard. Because Heidegger isn’t just saying “you’re going to die, so live life to the fullest.” That’s Hallmark existentialism. He’s saying something far more subtle: only the anticipation of death can pull us out of the “they-self.”

Why? Because death is mine. No one can die my death for me. It’s the one possibility that cannot be shared or delegated. That’s what makes it the ultimate individuating event. When I confront death—not just intellectually, but existentially—I’m forced to reckon with the radical finitude of my existence.

And that awareness isn’t paralyzing. It’s liberating. It frees me from the illusion that I have infinite time to “figure things out.” It shocks me into the realization that I must choose, and that not choosing is already a choice shaped by the They.

But what about hope, community, and care?

Here’s a critique I’ve heard a lot: isn’t Heidegger’s version of authenticity too inward, too isolating? Doesn’t it neglect the importance of relationships, community, and shared meaning?

Fair point—but only if you stop reading at Division I of Being and Time. Heidegger doesn’t deny Mitsein (being-with); in fact, authentic being requires others. The difference is that inauthentic being-with collapses into conformism, while authentic being-with involves a kind of solidarity through difference. We become more capable of genuine connection when we stop hiding behind norms.

So no, authenticity doesn’t mean becoming some solitary monk of angst. It means showing up in the world as someone who knows they’re going to die—and chooses anyway.

Spotting Inauthenticity in Everyday Life (It’s Everywhere, Honestly)

We’ve been pretty conceptual so far. Now let’s bring this back down to Earth and look at how inauthenticity shows up in day-to-day life. I’m not talking about abstract alienation or some vague existential crisis. I mean the mundane, sneaky, comfortable patterns that keep us sleepwalking through life.

Here’s a list of five places where “Das Man” shows up today—and how each subtly pulls us away from authenticity.

1. Social media “authenticity” is just another brand

We live in a time where people perform not performing. You post your messy bedroom with the caption “keeping it real,” and boom—you’ve curated authenticity. But that’s still a performance shaped by what the crowd expects authenticity to look like. You’re not escaping “the They”—you’re doubling down on it.

2. Career hustle culture as the new salvation

There’s a widespread assumption that your job should define you—and that “passion” should drive your work. But for many, this is just a more palatable script handed down by neoliberal norms. Choosing a conventional path and justifying it as “doing what I love” can mask inauthenticity, especially if that choice was never really questioned.

3. Therapy-speak as a defense mechanism

Don’t get me wrong—therapy is great. But phrases like “I’m setting a boundary” or “that’s not in alignment with my truth” can easily become rote language that avoids deeper confrontation with ambiguity or moral responsibility. In other words, a new form of Das Man-speak.

4. Decision-making outsourced to algorithms

Think about how often you let Spotify pick your next song, or rely on Netflix to suggest what to watch. That’s not inherently bad. But when you never push back, never resist the flow, you’re surrendering the space in which choice becomes real. And that’s dangerous.

Algorithms give us the illusion of personalization, but they’re actually aggregating patterns from the crowd. You’re not choosing—you’re being chosen.

5. Wellness culture’s obsession with optimization

The quest for biohacking, fitness tracking, and productivity hacks isn’t about living better—it’s about postponing death without confronting it. When your whole life is a project to maximize efficiency and minimize discomfort, you’re avoiding finitude, not facing it.

These aren’t fringe behaviors—they’re mainstream. They’re invisible precisely because they’re everywhere. And that’s what makes them existentially dangerous. Heidegger isn’t asking us to drop out of society and live in a cabin. He’s asking us to wake up inside the life we’re already living and start asking different questions: Why this? Who said this was the way? What else is possible?

That shift—from unconscious absorption to conscious retrieval—is the core of authenticity.

Final Thoughts

Authenticity isn’t a lifestyle. It’s not a mood. It’s not even an attitude. It’s an existential response to being finite, a way of facing the world with both eyes open and saying: Yes, this is mine. I will live it, not borrow it.

For those of us who’ve studied Heidegger and the existentialists for years, it’s easy to gloss over this stuff as familiar. But it’s worth revisiting, especially now—when normativity is algorithmic, death is sanitized, and selfhood is increasingly commodified. If Heidegger were around today, I think he’d say: “Das Man is still here—it just has better UX.”

And if we take that seriously, then living authentically becomes not just a philosophical ideal—but an act of resistance.