Have you ever opened up about your true feelings, only to be met with discomfort, avoidance, or unsolicited advice? Maybe you’ve been vulnerable, sharing pain or frustration, only to find people can’t seem to handle it. They either try to “fix” you, distance themselves, or flood you with motivational talks, as if your genuine emotions are something to be eradicated.

This is the problem with the world we live in today, and we’re all guilty of it. We’ve become uncomfortable with raw, real emotions. Instead, we prefer to engage with people who are masking their pain—meeting them in bars to drink away their sorrows, or at meals where we use food as a distraction. We form shallow, artificial connections because it’s easier than sitting in the discomfort of authenticity.

Why? Because we haven’t given ourselves permission to be authentic. How can we offer genuine support to others if we’re hiding from our own emotions? When someone expresses something real, it touches a part of us we’d rather ignore—a shadow side we’ve buried deep in our subconscious. We don’t like facing the broken parts of ourselves, so when others reveal theirs, we recoil.

This is why so many relationships today feel fake. When we can’t face our own pain, we can’t truly connect with the pain of others. And without that connection, there’s no authenticity—just a web of superficial interactions that leave us feeling more isolated than ever. It’s time to embrace authenticity, both in ourselves and in others, if we ever want to form real, meaningful relationships.