I took my first acting class in fifteen years this past January. I didn’t choose a traditional conservatory or a black box theater. Instead I chose a studio built around the idea that your body already knows things your brain is hiding from you. That studio was Fay Simpson‘s Lucid Body where she believes the body holds the truth that the mind is too refined to say out loud. You can’t fake your way through it because the room won’t let you. I’ve been thinking about rooms like this since then.
The experience felt human.
I walked in expecting to feel exposed, and instead I was brought back to my last year in college.
I hadn’t studied theater formally, but during my final year studying English Literature, the head of the theater department stopped me in a hallway one afternoon as I was leaving a vocal performance elective. She looked at me the way people rarely look at you, focused, without agenda, and asked:
“Why the hell aren’t you a theater major?”
I’ve asked myself that question every year since. She saw something in me. Something I wasn’t able to name yet. Something I wasn’t sure I was allowed to claim.
Recognition is transactional. Being seen lands in the body. It stays.
I remember the comfort of being seen more than anything else. The language of the body doesn’t ask you to produce something, it asks you to listen. The information is already intrinsic, human, yours. You’re finding it, not prompting or generating it. That distinction felt enormous. The same distinction Fay’s Lucid Body technique points at, finding versus generating, keeps showing up everywhere else now. In the job market. In our content feeds.
We are living through a moment where being good or even great at something is no longer sufficient. You also have to be legible enough to be found. The craft and the broadcast have collapsed into the same gig, and nobody actually agreed to that trade. I know this because I’m living it. Searching for work in a market where AI screens my resume before a human sees it. Where a system decides if you’re legible before you get a chance to show up as something real.
We have to become performers to get noticed. I think about that more than I want to admit. Scroll through any professional feed and the pattern is hard to ignore. People narrating their wins in real time, vulnerability packaged for reach.
I watch this and I feel two things simultaneously: I understand exactly why people do it, and something about it makes me tired.
The tired part is trying to figure out what feels like a math problem: If everyone is performing then what happens to the people who never learned how to package themselves? What happens to the ones the algorithm can’t find?
I don’t have a clean answer. I’m asking because I genuinely don’t know.
And the ones who did learn? What did it cost them?
Everyone manages how they’re perceived because we are all brands. Beyoncé is a brand, your favorite coworker is a brand, you are in fact a brand. Once you command sustained attention, the logic applies whether you want it to or not. So…
Are you real?
Is the content you’re consuming real, or does it exist for you?
It’s the difference between presence and performance. The line between them has never been harder to locate.
I keep coming back to what Fay calls lucidity: the truth in a moment, the thing that makes your audience feel like you’re not performing at all. Sitting on that floor of Fay’s class in January, I felt it briefly and it was different from almost everything else I’d been doing: producing lines for various audiences and calling it life.
I’ve built a career on how performance functions: how brands use it, how culture shapes it. But I know what it costs in your body, in your quality of thought, in your ability to ask a question without knowing how it will land.
I don’t know yet what makes something feel real enough to trust. I’m not sure that’s a question with a fixed answer. Which is, I think, what the acting class taught me.
Or started to.
In Part 2 I bring the question to six people who’ve been living inside it from completely different angles. An acting coach, an artist, a creative strategist, a gaming executive, a musician working with AI, and a legal scholar who has testified before Congress about what AI does to personhood. I asked all of them to interrogate what’s real. They don’t agree with each other. A few of them don’t quite agree with me.
I’ll let you know what I find.