Philosopher Joe Folley is skeptical that there’s a core self down there to find. In this Big Think Conversation with Jonny Thomson, he makes the case for a self that gets built rather than excavated — and argues that the attention it takes to build one has been quietly thinned down into something you spend, trade, and optimize.

Then: why nearly everyone reads the wrong Camus book, and why Camus himself seems to have thought his most famous philosophy was only half finished.

Joe Folley holds an undergraduate degree and a master’s in philosophy from Cambridge and is the creator of the YouTube channel Unsolicited Advice, where he makes philosophy accessible to a broad audience.

“I’m a bit skeptical of the sense of authenticity that we often talk about today. We tend to think about being authentic as burrowing down into ourselves in some sense and finding the core of us. I’m a little bit skeptical that such a core exists.…