A college admissions expert recently wrote a piece for Business Insider telling parents their teenagers are taking too many AP classes. His advice: drop the scariest advanced class, free up time, and use that margin to do something meaningful in your community. He gives compelling examples. A student who built a wildfire prediction app instead of maxing out his transcript. Another who gave up valedictorian status to serve as a Senate page. Both got into Yale. The actual valedictorian was rejected.
It's good advice, as far as it goes. But read it carefully and you notice something. The wildfire app isn't presented as valuable because the student cared about wildfires. It's presented as valuable because "that human element is what made his application compelling to Yale." The Senate page position wasn't worth pursuing because the student wanted to understand governance. It was worth pursuing because it was a better admissions strategy than getting perfect grades. Gardner hasn't escaped the game (as the article is written). He's presented as updating the mimicry. Instead of performing academic rigor through AP classes, you now perform authentic impact through community projects. The orientation toward the gatekeepers remains identical.
My father was Dean of Admissions at Swarthmore and then at Stanford, so I grew up watching this dynamic from the other side of the curtain. But the admissions game isn't really the point here. It's just where the pattern is easiest to see.
The deeper pattern is this: human beings are mimics first and authentic agents second, if at all. This isn't a moral failing. It's how we're built.
For most of human history, according to evolutionary psychology, survival depended on group membership. Getting expelled from the band was a death sentence. So the mind developed an exquisite sensitivity to social signals: what does the group reward, what does it punish, what performances does it expect from someone in my position? The individuals who tracked these signals well and reproduced them convincingly were the ones who stayed in the group, found mates, and passed on their genes. The ones who didn't, didn't.
This means the default orientation of the human mind is outward, not inward. We don't start with an authentic self and then decide how to present it. We start by scanning the social environment and constructing a self that fits (my theory of the "adaptive mind," the builder of our subconscious). The performance comes first. Whatever we experience as our "real" self is largely a story we tell about the performance after the fact. What we actually are, most of the time, is a performative self: a constantly updated projection, shaped less by inner conviction than by our reading of what the social environment will accept and reward.
Cal Newport, in How to Become a High School Superstar, tells students to "be" rather than to "appear." It's the right instinct. But it underestimates how deep the appearing goes. For most people, most of the time, appearing is being. The adaptive mind doesn't distinguish between them. It produces whatever version of you the environment seems to demand, and it does this so seamlessly that you experience the production as spontaneous self-expression.
This is why the college admissions game is so instructive. It's not that teenagers are uniquely fake or strategically cynical. It's that the admissions process creates an environment with unusually clear reward signals, so the mimicry becomes unusually visible. Twelve AP classes. A nonprofit founded in junior year. An essay about personal growth through adversity. These aren't evidence of who the student is. They're evidence of what the student believes admissions officers want to see. The performance is the point, and everyone involved, students, parents, counselors, even the admissions offices themselves, tacitly participates in the fiction that it isn't.
Gardner's intervention (as described) doesn't change this dynamic. It just shifts the mimicry to a higher register. Now, instead of mimicking rigor, you mimic impact. You build the wildfire app because that's what a "compelling applicant" looks like in 2026. The adaptive mind has simply updated its model of what the tribe rewards.
In a Paleolithic band, mimicry had natural limits. You could watch the good hunter and imitate his stance, but eventually you had to actually kill something. The performance had to cash out against reality. The social environment and the physical environment were the same environment, so the signals you optimized for were tightly coupled to the skills they represented.
Modern life has severed that coupling almost entirely. The "tribe" is now an abstraction, an admissions committee, a LinkedIn audience, an algorithm, a set of metrics designed by people you'll never meet. And the feedback loops operate purely at the level of representation. An admissions officer doesn't watch you build the wildfire app. She reads a 650-word essay about building it. Your manager doesn't see you think. She sees a deliverable that could have been produced by you, by AI, or by a clever remix of someone else's work. The signal and the substance have been pulled apart, and because the rewards track the signal, the substance becomes optional.
This is where mimicry stops being a benign feature of social cognition and becomes something more concerning. When the entire feedback loop operates through representations, the performance can run indefinitely without ever colliding with reality. A student can mimic rigor through twelve AP classes and never encounter what rigor actually feels like. A professional can mimic strategic thinking through well-formatted slide decks for an entire career. The mimicry isn't a phase you pass through on the way to competence. It becomes the competence, and no one in the system has any particular reason to check.
I think this is the key to understanding why social media has been so psychologically destabilizing, especially for young people. It's not just that social media creates pressure to perform. Humans have always performed. It's that social media creates an environment where the performance is the entirety of the interaction. There is no backstage. There is no moment where the mask comes off and you deal with unmediated reality. The adaptive mind, built to scan for social signals and produce fitting responses, finds itself in an environment of pure signal. So it does what it does, endlessly, without the natural interruptions that physical life used to provide.
The result isn't that people become fake in some simple sense. It's that the distinction between authentic and performed stops meaning anything. When every interaction is mediated, when every self-presentation is crafted for an audience even if the audience is imagined, when the feedback you receive is always about the representation rather than the thing represented, then the performative self isn't a layer on top of the real self. It's all there is. Not because people are shallow, but because the environment no longer provides the friction that would allow anything else to develop.
And there is a further turn. The ultimate expression of mimicry is capture: the moment when the performer stops leading the audience and starts being led by them. A politician who began with convictions discovers which lines get applause and gradually becomes a delivery mechanism for what the crowd already wants to hear. A comedian who once challenged audiences learns which bits get clicks and becomes a servant of the algorithm. This used to be a trap for the few, the price of fame, the corruption that came with public life. Social media has democratized it. Now every teenager with a following is subject to audience capture. Every professional curating a LinkedIn presence is adjusting, post by post, to the signals of approval, becoming less the author of their self-presentation and more its product. The performer doesn't just mimic what the tribe rewards. The performer becomes what the tribe rewards, and the original person, if there was one, recedes behind the performance until the distinction is no longer meaningful even to them.
This connects to something I've been thinking about with AI, and it's the part that worries me most.
If the whole apparatus of modern life, schooling, credentialing, professional advancement, social media, trains people to optimize for the appearance of competence rather than competence itself, then AI arrives into a world that has already done most of the preparation for cognitive surrender. The student who stacked AP classes wasn't building knowledge. She was building a transcript. The professional who produces polished deliverables isn't necessarily thinking. He's producing the signals of thinking. When AI offers to generate those signals more efficiently, the transition feels almost natural. You were already outsourcing the substance and keeping the performance. AI just makes the outsourcing frictionless.
The uncomfortable implication is that for many people, AI won't feel like a loss. If you were never optimizing for the real thing, if the performance was always the point, then a tool that produces better performances faster is an unambiguous upgrade. You don't mourn the thinking you're no longer doing if thinking was never what you were doing in the first place. You were mimicking thinking. You were producing its signals for an audience. AI produces better signals with less effort. From inside the logic of mimicry, there's nothing to grieve.
What gets lost is harder to name, precisely because the system was never set up to value it. It's the person you would have become if the doing had been real. The understanding that builds only through genuine struggle with material that resists you. The judgment that develops only through making real decisions with real consequences, not performing decisiveness for an audience. The inner life that takes shape only when you spend time oriented inward rather than outward, toward the thing itself rather than toward how the thing will look to others.
That person is foreclosed not by AI, but by the entire architecture of mimicry that AI completes. The student loading up on AP classes was already foreclosed. The professional optimizing deliverables for optics was already foreclosed. AI just removes the last thin residue of genuine effort that the performance still required, the residue that might, in some cases, have accidentally produced real learning along the way.
I don't think the answer is to tell people to be authentic, as if authenticity were a switch you could flip. The adaptive mind doesn't work that way. It responds to environments, not to exhortations. Newport can tell students to "be" rather than to "appear," and Gardner can tell them to pursue real impact rather than credential-stacking, but as long as the environment rewards the performance, the mind will produce the performance. It will simply incorporate the advice about authenticity into the performance. Now you mimic authenticity. Now you perform real impact. The adaptive mind is very, very good at this.
For devoted educators and parents, what might actually help is designing environments where the mimicry breaks down, where the performance can't substitute for the real thing. Small classes where you can't hide behind a polished essay. Apprenticeships where the work has to function, not just look good. Projects where failure is visible and consequential rather than something you spin into a growth narrative for your college application. Physical work. Embodied challenges. Anything that reintroduces the tight coupling between signal and substance that modern life has systematically dissolved.
The Amish, whatever else you think of them, understand something about this. When a new technology arrives, they don't ask "Is this useful?" They ask "What will this do to our community and our way of life?" (See my Amish Test post.) It's a question about environments, not tools. They know that people will adapt to whatever environment they're placed in, so the question worth asking is what kind of people a given environment will produce.
We could stand to ask that question more often. Not just about AI, though AI makes it urgent. About the whole apparatus of performance, credentialing, and social display that we've built and that is now building us.