 To say that we are always the They is not to say we are automata, however. Heidegger suggests that even in the bland conformism of “average everydayness” we are constantly making choices that reflect our understanding of who we are. Nevertheless, in average everydayness, we are as a rule adrift, acting as one of the “herd” or “crowd”—a form of life Heidegger calls “falling” (Verfallen). Heidegger (1962 [1927]: 220) emphasizes that calling this way of living “falling” does not imply that it is “a bad or deplorable ontical property of which, perhaps, more advanced stages of human culture might be able to rid themselves” (1962 [1927]: 220). On the contrary, since there is no exit from the social world—since it is the “only game in town”—it plays a positive role in creating the background of shared intelligibility that lets us be fully human in the first place. Nevertheless, Heidegger is aware that there is something deeply problematic about this falling mode of existence. In “doing what one does”, he suggests, we fail to own up to who we are. We do not take over our own choices as our own and, as a result, we are not really the authors of our own lives. To the extent that our lives are unowned or disowned, existence is inauthentic (uneigentlich), not our own (eigen).