The age of performative goodness

I’ve been thinking about phonies again.

Not because of social media. Not because of politics. Because of "The Catcher in the Rye," a book I first read in Mr. Caldwell’s ninth-grade English class at Loyola High School in Los Angeles.

Back then, I didn’t fully understand Holden Caulfield. Most of us didn’t. I just knew there was something about him that felt honest.

One of the themes that has stayed with me is his obsession with "phonies." In Chapter 17, Holden launches into one of his most memorable rants, venting to a female character about the conformist, superficial nature of school and adult life.

"It’s full of phonies," he says, railing against a world of performance, where people "keep making believe you give a damn" and move through carefully maintained social scripts, pretending to care, belong, or be something they are not.

There are a lot of phonies in the world today.

What’s changed is not just the number of them. It’s the system we live inside.

We now live in environments that reward performance over sincerity, attention over depth, image over substance. The more visible you are, the more "real" you are assumed to be. The more polished your message, the more trustworthy you appear.

We are all, in some way, pushed to curate versions of ourselves that are more acceptable, more admirable, more “good” than what we actually are in practice.

You see it everywhere.

Public leaders speak the language of compassion while making decisions that undermine the communities they claim to serve. Organizations center equity in branding while burning out the people doing the work. Individuals fluent in justice, healing, and community disappear when there is no audience, no recognition, no credit to claim.

It would be easy to conclude that everyone is fake.

That’s the most tempting interpretation. It’s also the least useful.

Because the truth is more complicated than phonies versus real people. Most of us are not one or the other. We are inconsistent. We contain contradictions. We show up with real care in some moments and drift into self-interest in others. We perform kindness sometimes because it is expected, and other times because it is who we are trying to become.

The danger isn’t hypocrisy itself.

It’s when hypocrisy becomes invisible because it is normalized.

Holden Caulfield’s frustration, his sense that everything is staged and hollow, comes from a desire for something more real. A desire for people to mean what they say. To act in alignment with their values. To stop rehearsing themselves for approval.

That desire is not wrong.

But it becomes corrosive when it turns into permanent distrust. When we assume everyone is always performing, we lose the ability to recognize sincerity when it shows up.

And sincerity does show up. Often quietly. Often without recognition.

I think about the people I’ve met over the years who don’t get credit for what they do. The parent who shows up to every school meeting because they care about what happens to other people’s children. The youth mentor who stays late long after funding runs out. The neighbor who organizes food drives without turning it into a personal brand.

None of them are perfect. All of them contain contradictions. Calling them phonies misses the point.

The real dividing line is not between authentic people and fake ones. It is between people willing to do the work when no one is watching and people who only perform when someone is.

That distinction matters more now than it used to.

We live in a moment where visibility is easily mistaken for virtue. Where saying the right thing publicly can substitute for doing the right thing privately. Where caring is often measured in posts, statements, and signals rather than in sustained, unglamorous action.

And yet communities are still held together by people who do not optimize for attention. They are held together by repetition, responsibility, and relationships that don’t trend.

So maybe the question is not “who is a phony?”

Maybe the better question is: Where are we being asked to perform care instead of practicing it?

And where, in our own lives, are we slipping into performance because it is easier than consistency?

If Holden Caulfield were walking through our world today, he would recognize a lot of what he hated. The polish, the slogans, the contradictions, the carefully managed public images.

I wonder if he would notice something else too.

Underneath all of it, there are still people trying to show up for one another. Imperfectly, inconsistently, but genuinely.

Not because it looks good. Not because it is rewarded. But because it holds something together that would otherwise fall apart.

The world is not divided neatly into phonies and real people. It never was.

It’s messier than that.

So are we.

Eric Ortiz lives in the Wedge with his family. He is executive director of the Strong Mind Strong Body Foundation, a national youth and community development nonprofit based in Minneapolis, and associate director of research for The Pivot Fund, a venture philanthropy organization that invests in community newsrooms serving underserved communities.