Every person you've ever met wears multiple masks stacked on top of each other. Everyone has something they wish to keep secret, something they believe, something they do, something they wish they didn't.
The concept of masks is so prevalent in society that it goes unspoken, understood only at a subconscious level. Many grow comfortable wearing those masks throughout their lives, and to some groups, it might be taboo to even mention they exist.
These masks form a theatrical layer in human interactions; society functions on an implicit agreement to honor them, to pretend we don't see through them even when we do. We become accomplished actors in this grand performance, switching personas as we move from boardroom to family dinner, from gym to grocery checkout.
We learn this choreography early. Watch a child discover that certain parts of themselves get praised while others get scolded, and you'll see the first mask being carved. The loud child learns to be "indoor quiet" at school, the sensitive child learns to be "tough" on the playground. By adolescence, we're master craftspeople, sculpting different versions of ourselves for parents, teachers, peers, crushes. By adulthood we may wear hundreds of masks at any given time without realizing it.
Some masks are paper-thin, the slight adjustment in your voice when you answer the phone, the way you hold your shoulders differently in elevators. Others are elaborate productions requiring full costume changes: transforming from weekend warrior to Monday morning professional, replacing casual profanity with carefully crafted corporate speak.
The simplest example: when someone asks "how are you doing?" you subconsciously know they want an answer no longer than a few words, most likely positive, because anything else would upset the peace. Sometimes the thought comes through your mind, what if I could step outside myself, take off the mask and be open with someone who listens, someone I don't know in real life, someone who also shed their masks to engage openly?
Sometimes the masks slip. You catch yourself laughing too loudly at a work event, sharing a political opinion that doesn't match your professional persona, or letting frustration show when you're supposed to be the patient parent. These moments of authenticity breaking through feel simultaneously liberating and terrifying.
The exhausting part isn't just wearing the masks; it's remembering which one you're supposed to have on. Walking into a room and quickly calculating who you need to be in that space, what aspects of yourself are welcome and which need tucking away. It's the mental gymnastics of keeping stories straight, ensuring the version of yourself presented to one group doesn't conflict with what another knows.
There's a particular loneliness that comes with successful mask-wearing. You can be surrounded by people who like the version you've presented and still feel utterly unknown. It's the isolation of being celebrated for a performance rather than loved for who you are. You wonder if anyone would stick around if they saw what was underneath.
For some this game is thrillingthere's power in adapting, fitting in anywhere, being liked by everyone. Social shape-shifting as superpower. But for others it's immensely tiresome, this constant vigilance, this perpetual performance anxiety. They feel like imposters in their own lives, exhausted by remembering who they're supposed to be and when. The masks that were once liberating become suffocating. They long for spaces where they can simply exist without calculation, without performance, without the exhausting work of being appropriate. Yet they're still forced to play the game, because the alternative is what's described in every dystopian novel, the complete loss of individual thought and liberty.
None of this is news to anyone who has read Goffman [1] or Jung [2] ; they explored this concept far better than I could in such a short piece. In fact, the entire concept comes from Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [1].
What they couldn't have seen is that those of us who find the masks tiring allocate portions of our day to taking them off and showing one usually hidden part of ourselves to others doing the same. I'm talking about pseudonymous online communities.
In these digital spaces, freed from reputation's weight and the expectations of people who know our "real" names, something extraordinary happens. The masks don't disappear entirely, we're still performing, still curating, but the performance becomes voluntary rather than compulsory. You can choose which aspects to reveal, build relationships based on thoughts and ideas rather than social positioning or professional networking.
These communities become laboratories for authenticity, places to test-drive parts of yourself that don't fit your offline persona. The introvert can be philosophical, the executive can admit uncertainty, the responsible parent can explore weird humor, the shy office worker may explore artistic talent. It's not complete authenticity, that's undesirable, but it's authentic in ways that feel both novel and deeply necessary.
The beautiful irony is that some of the deepest connections happen between people who will never meet, who know each other only through carefully chosen words on screens. Freed from visual cues and social markers that trigger our mask reflexes, we encounter each other more directly. At the end of the day, isn't that what everyone wants?
Apparently not. Some people want to stop those spaces from existing, as they benefit from a life where everyone always wears masks and they're the only ones who can see us without them.
These people understand something fundamental about power: when everyone else is performing while you see behind the curtain, you hold all the cards. They recognize that pseudonymous spaces threaten the world they control, because authenticity is inherently subversive to systems built on control. When someone can speak freely without professional or social consequences, they might point out that the emperor has no clothes, or worse, that the emperor knows perfectly well he's naked.
The push to eliminate online anonymity is often framed as accountability and "protecting children," because those in power know these words trigger emotional responses.
But this misses the essential function these spaces serve. Yes, anonymity can enable bad behavior, but it also enables vulnerable honesty. The person struggling with addiction, the whistleblower, the artist sharing work they're not ready to attach their name to, the teenager figuring out their identity away from family expectations.
What's particularly insidious is how this elimination happens gradually through seemingly reasonable requests. First it's "real names only" policies to stop trolls. Then verification requirements to prevent bots. Before long, every digital interaction requires the same careful curation as a job interview or family reunion.
When these authentic spaces disappear, something irreplaceable is lost. We lose the relief valve that keeps constant performance pressure from becoming unbearable. We lose the laboratory where new ideas can be tested without career-ending consequences. Most importantly, we lose proof that genuine connection is possible, that beneath all our masks, we're not as different or alone as we thought.
The result is a society of successful performers who have forgotten what they were performing for, trapped in a system where everyone has agreed to pretend the masks are the real faces. And perhaps that's exactly what some people want: a world so invested in its own performance that it forgets to question who's writing the script.
The question becomes: in our rush to make everything "authentic" by forcing real names and real consequences onto every interaction, are we actually destroying the only spaces where authenticity was truly possible? And if so, who benefits from that destruction?
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[1] Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life.
[2] Jung, C. G. (1969). The archetypes and the collective unconscious
