A friend of mine recently recommended that I visit a bar here in Bangalore, insisting it was one of the best places he has been to in a while in the city. He wasn't alone with that feedback, almost everyone I spoke to echoed the exact same sentiment, and the reviews where the same promising that the food was amazing, the beer was unparalleled, and the vibe was absolutely perfect.
So, I planned an evening around it, gathered a few friends, and got a table. Almost immediately after we sat down, the chorus started, with everyone at the table raving about how incredible the ambiance was. I sat there looking around, took a sip of my beer, and found myself nodding right along in complete agreement.
But deep down, if I’m being absolutely honest with myself, I really wasn't impressed. The place, beer and food was’nt bad but to me It was just fine, like many other bars I’ve visited in the city.
This made me wonder why I still felt the need to nod and manufacture enthusiasm for a place that left me completely indifferent. For the longest time, I thought moments like this were just about being polite, you don't want to ruin the vibe or be the cynic at the table. But the more I think about what was actually happening in that bar, the more I realize it runs much deeper than politeness. I wasn't just borrowing a feeling from the people around me; I was borrowing their certainty.
When everyone around you is absolutely certain that something is a masterpiece, whether that happens to be a crowded microbrewery in Bangalore, a bestselling business book, a startup keynote or podcast nobody wants to be the first person to raise their hand and admit they just don't see it. We don't fake our enthusiasm because we suddenly love the thing, but rather because uncertainty can be socially expensive. We or I pretend to know what everyone else already seems to know, assuming that if everyone else loves it, our internal narrative must be flawed and we must be missing the context required to appreciate it.
We usually frame this as a problem of taste or a lack of authenticity, but I think it stops one level too early. This I think is actually a crisis of agency.
When we constantly borrow other people’s certainty to feel safe in a room, we eventually stop making our own judgments altogether. We don't do this because we lack intelligence, but because we’ve slowly stopped trusting it. We are actively surrendering our Intellectual confidence, giving up the quiet, grounded ability to sit at a table and simply say, "I don't know," or, "Maybe everyone else is right, but that's just not my experience."
We surrender that confidence because we carry this deeply ingrained assumption that certainty naturally belongs to other people. In the same way that children assume adults have all the answers, employees assume managers know best, and readers assume the critics are always right, we sit at the table assuming that the consensus must possess some profound understanding that we simply lack. But the strange, liberating, and almost absurd truth is that everyone else at the table is probably doing the exact same thing. Most of the people we look to for validation are secretly borrowing their certainty from someone else, trapping us all in a bizarre loop where nobody wants to admit they are actually underwhelmed, so everyone just performs the expected enthusiasm.
And if we participate in that performance for long enough, I feel a terrifying shift happens.
The greatest danger isn’t just pretending to like something in the moment to fit in. The real danger is doing it so often that one day you can no longer tell the difference between your own opinion and the one you inherited. You stop borrowing feelings, and you start losing your identity entirely.
Authenticity isn’t about aggressively refusing to learn from others; it’s simply refusing to fake your own understanding. Sometimes, the most authentic thing you can do is have the courage to be completely unimpressed, allowing yourself to sit at the table and feel exactly what you feel, even if that happens to be nothing at all.
Maybe the goal isn’t to develop better taste, but just to develop enough confidence to remember what your own voice sounds like.