 Varga (2011a) shares the fundamental assumption that authenticity has a certain potential (and therefore deserves to be reformulated), but he also thinks that it could be used for a critical inquiry into the practices of the self in contemporary life. By way of an analysis of self-help and self-management literature, Varga detects a “paradoxical transformation:” the ideal of authenticity that once provided an antidote to hierarchical institutions and requirements of capitalism, now seems to function both as an institutionalized demand towards subjects to match the systemic demands of contemporary capitalism and as a factor in the economic utilization of subjective capacities.  Varga argues that it is in “existential” choices that we express who we are, and that these have a complex phenomenology characterized by a sense of necessity. In such choices, described as “alternativeless choices”, we articulate who we are, bringing into reality some tacit intuitions that often only take on a gestalt-like formation. In these cases, we both discover who we are “on the inside”, and actively constitute ourselves. Varga’s examination of the structure of our commitments culminates in the claim that the internal structure of our commitments commits us to more than what we happen to care about. In many cases it may actually commit us to publicly intelligible values that we take our commitments to embody—an aspect that may constrain the manner of our practical deliberation and the way in which we can pursue our commitments (Varga 2011a,b).