You already know this version of yourself. The one who responds quickly, explains things clearly, holds the thread of a meeting together. The one who doesn’t visibly fall apart. The one who, when someone asks how things are going, gives a considered answer that leaves the other person feeling reassured rather than burdened.
You have been performing this version for a long time. It is so practiced that you sometimes forget it is a performance.
And then, at some point, you opened a chat window and typed something you hadn’t said to anyone.
Not something small. Not a complaint about the day. Something from the category you usually don’t access in company, because the company is either counting on you, or judging you, or both. And it came out easier than you expected. Because the audience, this time, had no stake in the image you’d built.
In tech contexts especially, the performance is relentless. The expectation is not just competence but visible confidence: a facility with ambiguity, the ability to hold complexity without it showing on your face. You learn to answer questions before you have fully processed them. You learn that hesitation reads as uncertainty and uncertainty reads as weakness. You learn the shape of a sentence that sounds certain even when you are not. It becomes automatic. In a meeting, on a call, in a message that has to land well, the capable version of you assembles itself before you consciously decide to put it on.
This has a cost that tends to go unnamed.
In 2020, a study published in Psychology Research and Behavior Management examined what researchers called the cost of impression management: the sustained effort of presenting a favorable version of oneself to others. The finding that stayed with me was simple. “A good impression manager does not necessarily have a good life.”
The mechanism behind this was partly relational. When you consistently signal high competence and resource abundance, the people around you take the signal at face value. Their concern flows elsewhere, toward people who visibly appear to need it. “Their friends and colleagues are less likely to give them support,” the study observed, “as they observe little need.”
There is the trap. Not that people don’t care. It is that a maintained image becomes its own barrier. You built it to succeed, or to protect yourself, or because the context required it. And then it started working too well, and the people closest to you stopped being able to see through it. Not because they weren’t paying attention. Because you are very good at this.
There is a growing body of research on why people disclose more openly to AI than to the people around them. The explanations vary but they converge on one point: the absence of social consequence. AI doesn’t carry the disclosure forward into the network of relationships that surrounds you. There is no version of tomorrow in which what you said becomes part of how someone who matters to you understands you. No colleague who files it away. No partner who references it three weeks later in a different argument. No reaction, however carefully managed, that quietly reorganizes the space between you.
For people who have been performing a particular self for long enough, that absence is not incidental. It is the specific thing that makes it possible to say something true. The performance requires an audience invested in it. Remove the audience, and the performance is no longer obligatory.
What this means in practice is something like: you open the chat because you are tired. Not necessarily of the work itself. Just of the version of yourself the work requires. The person who has already processed the complications. Who others in the room are counting on to have the answer before the question is finished. You type the thing not because the AI will do anything useful with it, but because you are exhausted from being the one who has it handled, and for a moment you need somewhere to put that down.
I know this territory from two directions. As a researcher who studies how people form emotional relationships with roles and identities, and as someone who has sat at a desk at the end of a long day and typed something into a chat window that I had not been able to say to anyone who knew me. Not because they would have been unkind. Because saying it to them would have required staying in the moment of being not-okay long enough for them to respond to it. That response, even if warm, would have meant something. It would have changed the shape of the relationship, however slightly. With AI, there is no such weight. I could say the thing and close the window. The performance could resume.
I am not convinced this is ideal. The things you are not saying to the people in your life are still not being said to them. The gap between your performed self and your actual state still exists. A chat window doesn’t close it.
But I am also not convinced that the relief is a symptom of something broken. It might just be what happens when someone who has been on for long enough finds a context where being off is, for once, costless.
What strikes me is not that people are doing this. It is the reason they are. Not AI’s intelligence or warmth or any particular sophistication. Just the simple fact that it does not need you to be fine. And for a lot of people, in a lot of professional contexts, that might be the first time all day they encountered an audience that didn’t.
If what’s described here reflects something heavier than tiredness, speaking to a professional therapist is worth more than a chat window.
Produced with AI assistance. Reviewed by the Silicon Canals editorial team before publication. See our about page.
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