I have 500,000 users on a project I built. I learned an entire programming language by reading documentation on my phone. I migrated a codebase from Python to Go using StackOverflow answers and sheer stubbornness.
And yesterday, I spent 20 minutes refreshing my GitHub profile to see if my star count changed.
This is the authenticity paradox: the gap between what I’ve actually accomplished and how I feel about it. Between who I am online and who I am when nobody’s watching. Between the version of me that exists on LinkedIn and the version that exists in my group chats with friends.
I’m not sure which one is real anymore. And I suspect I’m not alone in this digital identity crisis.
This is a specific flavor of developer imposter syndrome where the better you look on paper, the more fraudulent you feel. It’s the social media anxiety that comes from comparing your internal chaos to everyone else’s highlight reel.
The Metrics Trap: How GitHub and LinkedIn Impact Developer Mental Health
Here’s my morning routine that I’m not proud of:
- Wake up, grab phone
- Check GitHub - did anyone star my repos overnight?
- Check Google Search Console - how’s my portfolio ranking?
- Check LinkedIn - any new followers, any engagement on posts?
- Check Instagram - just to see what everyone else is doing
This takes maybe 15 minutes. Sometimes 30 if I start doom-scrolling.
The numbers affect my mood for the rest of the day. Up? I feel validated, like I’m on the right track. Down or flat? Something’s wrong. I’m not doing enough. I’m falling behind.
I know this is unhealthy. The rational part of my brain understands that GitHub stars don’t determine my worth as a developer. That LinkedIn followers don’t correlate with actual skill. That Instagram engagement is literally designed to be addictive.
But knowing something and feeling it are different things.
The worst part is scrolling Twitter (I refuse to call it X) and seeing people in San Francisco announce their seed rounds. “Excited to announce we’ve raised $2M to revolutionize [something].” Meanwhile, I’m sitting in my apartment in Arizona, a grad student at ASU, wondering if I’m wasting my potential.
Research backs this up: A 2025 study found that people spending 5-6 hours daily on social platforms still reported feeling socially isolated. The researchers identified something called the “authenticity-visibility paradox” - as users become more visible online, they present less authentic versions of themselves, which undermines genuine connection.
More visibility. Less authenticity. More loneliness. The social media comparison trap is real, and we’re all falling into it.
The Curated Self: Balancing Online Persona and Real Identity
I grew up in India. The path was clear: get good grades, get a job, maybe join the family business. Success meant stability. Ambition meant not rocking the boat too much.
Then I moved to the US for my Master’s. I lived with my uncle, and everything changed.
My uncle is a businessman. Real estate, restaurants, investments. Living with him, I absorbed a completely different worldview: you can build anything. If you don’t know how to do something, you hire someone who does. Money is a tool. Scale is possible.
This wasn’t the mindset I grew up with. It was exciting and terrifying.
Now I’m a mixture of both worlds. I visit India two or three months a year. I have friends there who know a version of me that my American friends have never seen. And I have friends here who know a version of me that my Indian friends wouldn’t recognize.
It gets more fragmented online:
LinkedIn/GitHub me: Serious tech guy. Projects with impressive user counts. Contributions to open source. Professional headshot. “Passionate about building scalable systems.” (I even wrote a Claude vs Cursor vs Copilot comparison because that’s what serious tech guys do, apparently.)
Instagram/Snapchat me: Fun. Friends. Car meets. New restaurants. Memories that stay in the group chat and never become “content.”
Portfolio me: The “landing page” version. Curated highlights. The person I want you to find when you Google my name.
My close friends - the ones who actually know me - say something that sticks with me: “He’s knowledgeable, but he’s not the person you see online.”
They’re right. And I don’t know how to fix that. This gap between my online persona and real life self keeps widening.
Psychology Today calls this “the curated self” - the selection, organization, and presentation of online content about yourself. They quote something that haunts me: “As the virtual self takes over, the real self is displaced.”
We curate our lives around perceived perfection because we’re rewarded with hearts, likes, and thumbs up. The feedback loop trains us to show more of what gets engagement and less of what doesn’t. Eventually, even we forget which parts are real.
Developer Imposter Syndrome: Why Success Feels Like a Performance
Let me tell you about Alita Robot.
It’s a Telegram bot for group management. I built it originally in Python, but I wanted to learn Go. So I rewrote the entire thing - not because Python wasn’t working, but because I wanted to challenge myself.
I learned Go by reading documentation on my phone. I had an Android with a terminal shell installed, and I’d code on the bus, in waiting rooms, whenever I had downtime. I scoured StackOverflow for answers. I made mistakes, broke things, fixed them, broke them again. (If you’re curious about how I approach learning new tech, I wrote about my my 2026 developer tools and stack.)
Eventually, it worked. The bot grew. 500,000 users.
Here’s the thing: sharing that number feels performative.
Because when I say “500k users,” you picture success. You picture someone who had a plan, executed it flawlessly, and reaped the rewards.
You don’t picture the mess. The bugs I shipped at 2am that broke everything. The hours I spent trying to understand why something wasn’t working. The nights I almost gave up. The imposter syndrome when someone asked how I built it and I wanted to say “honestly, I have no idea how it works half the time.”
The highlight reel erases the messy middle. This is the core of developer imposter syndrome - we see everyone’s polished output and compare it to our chaotic process.
This is why I’ve started valuing small, authentic circles over large, visible ones. I’ve been in friend groups that looked great from the outside but were full of drama and fakeness internally - people being nice to each other’s faces while talking shit behind backs. I left those groups.
The friends I have now are different. We’re real with each other. We don’t perform. And none of that makes it to Instagram.
The Psychology of Caring Too Much in a “Don’t Give a F*ck” World
I read Mark Manson’s “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.” You know the premise: you have a limited number of fucks to give in your lifetime. Choose them wisely. Stop caring about things that don’t matter.
Great advice. I believe it intellectually.
I still care about everything.
Not in a anxious, spiral-out-of-control way (usually). More in a… I notice things way. How people react. What makes them uncomfortable. The small moments that seem insignificant but might actually matter.
Humans are sophisticated. What seems like a throwaway comment can scar someone. What looks like a small gesture can make someone’s day. I don’t want to miss those moments.
This creates tension with the “limited fucks” philosophy. If I care about everything, aren’t I wasting my fuck budget?
I don’t think so. I think there’s a difference between caring and being consumed. I can notice how someone feels without letting it derail my entire day. I can be aware of human complexity without losing myself in it.
This connects to why I want to be a social entrepreneur, not just an entrepreneur. Building something isn’t enough for me. I want to build something that actually helps people. That changes lives. The business mindset my uncle taught me - scale, hire talent, move fast - is valuable. But it’s not the destination. It’s a tool for impact.
The tension I feel daily: I want to go big. I want to be known. I see those SF founders on Twitter and feel the pull of that world. But I also want to take walks. Go to car meets. Try new restaurants with friends. Be present.
Maybe the answer isn’t choosing one or the other. Maybe it’s holding both, uncomfortably, and seeing what happens. Maybe authentic self online is just another myth we’ve been sold.
The Authenticity Paradox of Personal Branding
I built this portfolio - the site you’re reading right now - so that when something I make blows up, people can find me. They can Google my name and see the full picture.
But which “full picture”?
The portfolio version of me is still curated. I chose which projects to highlight. I wrote the bio. I selected which blog posts to publish (like this one - is this authentic, or is writing about authenticity just another performance?).
Research from ACM calls this the “online authenticity paradox”: people strive to achieve online authenticity, yet because doing so requires sharing negative experiences on social media, online authenticity is often unreachable - or is possible only at great personal cost.
To be seen as authentic, you have to be vulnerable. But vulnerability online has consequences. Employers see your posts. Investors Google you. That hot take might haunt you.
So we perform authenticity instead. We share struggles, but only the ones that make us look good in hindsight. We admit failures, but only after we’ve recovered from them. We’re “real,” but in a very controlled way.
Another researcher put it perfectly: authenticity on social media is “an unrepeatable temporary interval” - a moment that passes, never fully achievable, always slipping away.
Living With the Digital Identity Paradox
I don’t have a solution to this.
I’m not going to tell you I’ve found balance or that I’ve stopped checking my metrics (I checked Cloudflare Analytics twice while writing this post). I’m not going to pretend I’ve resolved the tension between my India self and my US self, or that my online persona and real self have finally merged into one authentic whole.
They haven’t.
What I’m trying instead:
Keeping the real stuff in group chats. Not everything needs to be content. Some memories are better when they stay between friends.
Accepting that metrics will affect my mood. Fighting it is exhausting. Noticing it is easier. “Oh, I’m feeling anxious because my star count dropped. Interesting. Anyway.”
Staying in authentic circles. The fake friend groups aren’t worth it. The small, real ones are everything.
Admitting I’m performing. Even this blog post is a performance. I chose what to share and what to leave out. But at least I know I’m doing it.
Maybe that’s the only authenticity available: knowing you’re playing a game while you play it.
The metrics will probably decide my mood tomorrow. I’ll probably check LinkedIn before I check anything else. I’ll probably feel that pang of “I’m behind” when I see someone announce their funding round.
But I’ll also probably go for a walk. Meet friends. Talk about things that will never become content. And in those moments, the paradox dissolves.
Not because I’ve solved it. But because I’ve stopped trying to.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear your experience. What’s the gap between your online self and your real self? Hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn - though I’ll admit the irony of asking for engagement on a post about the toxicity of engagement.
