We’ve all come across different versions of the “just be yourself” principle at some point. Being told to “follow your dreams” or “say what you think” can often feel like empty platitudes. But what does it actually mean to be yourself and is it something you can aim for?

In this week’s podcast, we discuss being yourself. We explore evolutionary biology, Dunbar’s number, Aristotle, status hierarchies, eating olives and different cultural approaches to individualism and collectivism. We ask how to objectively disambiguate authenticity and inauthenticity and suggest some metrics for measuring our inner feelings and behaviour. Finally, we share moments from our lives where we were guilty of inauthenticity.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

- Trait personality and state variability
- Does intraindividual variability of personality states improve perspective taking
- Variability in state authenticity predicts daily affect and emotion regulation
- Distinguishing between authenticity and personality consistency in predicting well-being
- Tim Urban’s What’s our problem

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