Perhaps the most significant lesson from authenticity is that our status appraisers never judge us on a single signal, cue, or significant absence: they compare our tastes against our demographics to understand who we are.

This shift from authenticity by origin to authenticity by content is proof that we remain obsessed with keeping it real, even in an increasingly inauthentic world. Authentic goods are still more valuable than exclusive goods. And an individual’s taste must match their backstory. Fakers and poseurs will be punished. This has an overall effect of

Our standards are shifting toward authenticity by content: the principle that the best things are those made by the original methods (i.e., “It ain’t where you’re from; it’s where you’re at”).

Ideally all signals should be behavioral residue—reflections of how we live rather than items acquired for the purpose of claiming status. Authentic tastes are “natural” tastes—an effortless extension of the inner self and origin story rather than a calculated set of borrowings and acquisitions. Like musicians say about the blues, “You either have

Theorist René Girard writes, “The ‘inauthentic’ person is the one who follows directives from others, whereas the ‘authentic’ is the person who desires autonomously.” Those who behave for the approval of others are “phonies,” to quote Holden Caulfield. There is universal disdain for poseurs—individuals who are caught fielding an overly crafted

Self-actualizing personalities, according to the psychologist Abraham Maslow, are “marked by simplicity and naturalness, and by lack of artificiality or straining for effect.”

A critical point about originality, however, is that choices never need to be original on an absolute, universal scale. They must merely be surprising within the community. A shortcut for great taste is arbitrage, finding easily procured things in one location and then deploying them elsewhere where they’re rare.

“The faculty of taste,” writes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “cannot create a new structure, it can only make adjustments to one that already exists. Taste loosens and tightens screws, it does not build a new piece of machinery.”

Status symbols live and die by their context: