A beautiful philosophical article, Sasha, my compliments. But...

Philosophy itself is one-step removed from reality. It is the human mind (i.e. a tool) discussing reality using words, in this case the concept of authenticity.

The truth is our being alive and, when investigating the truth, there are small-part truths and there are overall truths.

The interesting part about the largest overall truths is that there are only neutral and negative overall truths.

Neutral:

Everything, Nature, Mankind, God, Whole, Balance, Life, etcetera.

Note how these words point to some kind of largest aspect of something and how these concepts themselves are negative nor positive. They are neutral.

Negative:

"The only certainty is uncertainty"

"There is no truth" (declared as a truth).

Positive:

There are many positive concepts, think of Love or Friendship. Yet they do not fit in the set of largest categories, no matter how important we make them. They belong at minimum one level below the largest of concepts.

The reason is astonishingly easy: We do not live in the original state of the universe, we live in the result. We are ourselves not the whole of everything there is (obviously), and as such we are ourselves our own 'everything'. We can see ourselves as positive, negative, or in a neutral manner -- all options are available for us because we are not at the largest overall level itself.

A long story to show what philosophers are not doing right: They do not take the structural setup in consideration but place a concept at the overall level and discuss it.

Then they want to make the concept a positive, and they end up in trouble at the largest of levels because that level does not have any positives.

--

Lastly, an analogy.

If the original state of the universe was a Vase, then today the universe is the result of that Vase shattered.

If we are looking for the Vase in the pieces then we may actually see quite a bit of it. But if we desire the Vase to be whole, somehow, somewhere, then we are fooling ourselves.

We are each a little piece of that Vase. We do not live in the Vase setting. We live in the broken and shattered Vase setting.

Compliments for the article, though. You wrote this elegantly well and it was a pleasure to read.