The high cost of authenticity

Surface acting is when front line service employees, the ones who interact directly with customers, have to appear cheerful and happy even when they’re not feeling it. This kind of faking is hard work—sociologists call it “emotional labor”—and research shows that it’s often experienced as stressful. It’s psychologically and even physically draining; it can lead to lowered motivation and engagement with work, and ultimately to job burnout. 

Having to act in a way that’s at odds with how one really feels—eight hours a day, five days a week (or longer)—violates the human need for a sense of authenticity. We all want to feel that we’re the same person on the outside as we are on the inside, and when we can’t achieve that congruence, we feel alienated and depersonalized.

Faking it can be hard, depending on what you're faking. Most people can fake an orgasm when they're with someone they love and they don't want to hurt their feelings but just try faking lust for someone who repulses you. 

The explanation given above strikes me as false. I don't think many people have an issue with acting in a way that is at odds with how they really feel. When it is in our interest to conceal our feelings, we have no trouble doing it and everyone has an interest in hiding some of their feelings. It's a skill we all pick up pretty early in life and that no sane person willingly gives up.

If anything, I would argue that a need for authenticity is something people need to be trained to feel. It's only in a society where people are trained to feel entitled to authenticity that it becomes some sort of imposition to expect employees to be cheerful on the job. For anyone over fifty, what is weird about this situation is not that companies are asking employees to be cheerful on the job but that it even has to be said. 

The thing is, you have control over your emotions. They don't just happen to you like bird shit dropping on your head. It's just basic human courtesy to make an effort to be cheerful for others. It's not expected at all times—if you get really bad news, you can let it show—but, otherwise, putting people through your bad moods is what inconsiderate jerks do. And the more casual the relationship you have with a person, the more inconsiderate it is to subject them to your bad mood.

Authenticity isn't a real virtue but the simulacrum of one. The real virtue is moral integrity.