The Aesthetics of Authenticity
A personal reflection on digital intimacy – and a seasonal roundup of what’s capturing my attention.
I've been thinking a lot lately about authenticity: what it means, how we perform it, and what happens when the line between inspiration and appropriation gets blurry. This week, I had an experience that crystallised all of these thoughts in the most unsettling way.
(As always, for paid subscribers, the second half of this letter includes a curated selection of articles, books, films, and small obsessions worth your time.)
I was scrolling through my feed when I felt it, that visceral jolt of recognition that makes you stop mid-breath. There, in a popular Substack newsletter the algorithm had served me, were my words. Not exactly my words, but something more unsettling: the feel of them, the specific way I process the world, my particular strain of wistfulness made digestible for someone else's audience.
It wasn't plagiarism in the traditional sense – that would have been easier to name, easier to fight. This was something more insidious, like finding someone wearing your clothes but insisting they bought them new. My words had been “creatively transformed”, run through some mysterious process that maintained their emotional DNA while obscuring their origins. Everything was there: my imagery, my way of seeing, even my personal experiences repurposed as someone else's interior landscape. But it was all rendered in trendy lowercase, fragmented and artsy to make it current and poetic.
Two phrases, however, remained intact. Completely mine. And suddenly I understood that this wasn't unconscious influence, the natural way writers absorb language patterns from authors they admire. This wasn't even deliberate borrowing, though the line between inspiration and appropriation is always murky. This was something else entirely: the commodification of interiority itself.
The writing showed clear literary influences: Annie Ernaux's focus on mundane experiences, Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness attention to domestic details, Ishiguro's emotional weight of the unspoken. Being influenced by celebrated authors is normal, expected even. But this felt different. This was my lived experience, my specific disorientation, transformed into someone else's performance of authenticity.
What troubles me most isn't just the appropriation – it's what it reveals about how certain types of vulnerability and mundane intimacy have become almost commodified. The way newsletters like this perform relatability for engagement, turning personal revelation into content strategy. In our attention economy, even our most honest moments become raw material for someone else's brand of authenticity.
I keep thinking about that phrase “creatively transformed”. As if transformation could excuse appropriation. As if running my words through an AI filter, or simply changing the formatting, somehow makes them fair game. But some things resist transformation. Some words should stay exactly where their author left them, rooted in the specific soil of experience that created them.
Perhaps this is the price of putting our hearts online – not just that someone might steal our words, but that they might steal the feeling behind them. That somewhere out there, someone is performing my feelings, my specific way of seeing, for subscribers who will never know they're reading the ghost of someone else's experience. In this strange new world where authenticity itself has become aesthetic, we're all just raw material for someone else's carefully curated vulnerability.
In the end, there are enough stories for all of us. Enough authentic experiences to fill a thousand newsletters. Perhaps the real tragedy isn't that someone borrowed my voice, but that they felt they needed to, when their own story was always there, waiting to be told.
SEASONS /summertime, linger longer
I understand the longing for change – the desire to feel the air shift, to mark time by the colour of leaves. And autumn has its pull, of course. But everything has its hour. I don't believe in hurrying time itself, in wishing away what we have for what's to come. Summer, at least officially, holds court until late September. There's still heat in the pavement, still time for late dinners outside and walks that don’t require a coat. Change comes soon enough. I’d rather stay with what’s here a little longer, even if it’s fading. Especially then.
So here's to lingering a little longer – to wringing every drop of warmth from these final weeks, to refusing the rush toward what's next. Here are some ways to hold onto summer while it's still ours…
Linger at every sidewalk café and sun-soaked terrace before the chairs are stacked away // Pack a blanket, crusty bread, and good cheese for a picnic somewhere that stops your breath (perhaps overlooking the Thames) // Close your eyes and let the sun warm your face and bare shoulders until you can almost hear waves crashing // Actually make that trip to the seaside // Stay out late with wine and conversation, long past sunset, on these last warm nights // Wear your lightest dress one more time, feel it move against your skin in the evening breeze // Buy peaches at their peak and eat them standing over the kitchen sink // Leave windows open all night and wake to morning light streaming across unmade sheets // Cut armfuls of late-blooming dahlias and roses before the first frost comes // Take the long way home when the golden hour hits, even if you're tired // Find a quiet spot in the garden with a book and read until the light fades, marking your place with a fallen leaf //Swim in the sea at dusk when the water holds the day's warmth // Walk barefoot on grass that's still green, still soft from summer rain
RECENTLY /at hyperreality
Spent a long time researching and writing my essay on Metamodernism and the Art of Hopeful Uncertainty for last week’s letter. It’s a dense piece (demanding, even) and I know many of you haven’t yet had the time (or energy) to wade through it yet. Still, the process of writing felt profoundly fulfilling, both personally and intellectually.
For years, I’ve circled the act of writing – longing for it, delaying it, telling myself I’d return when life allowed. And now, having finally sat down with it, I’m reminded of something simple and strange: that certain thoughts don’t fully arrive until they’re coaxed into form, until they’re given over to the slow, deliberate work of shaping sentences.
I spent years telling myself I’d find time to write, as if time were something that might one day present itself willingly. What I forgot – what I always forget – is that writing isn’t about having time so much as it is about making space, internally, for the kind of thought that only arrives when you're alone with a sentence long enough to see what it’s really saying.
In those quiet hours spent wrestling with ideas, watching thoughts take shape in sentences, feeling the subtle satisfaction when the right phrase emerges to express something that once felt just out of reach, I'm reminded why I was drawn to writing in the first place. Not simply as a means of communication, but as a way of thinking.
What follows is for paid subscribers: the articles worth your time, including the end of handwriting, a seventeen-year-old who solved a major mathematical mystery, and Ozempic's emerging role in anti-aging. Also, the book currently absorbing me and others on my reading list, recent films we've screened, and and so much more.