The Authenticity Trap

Ozempic, the Body, and What Young People Are Really Looking For

Annie Spratt on Unsplash.

If you’ve spent any time using a streaming service, you’ve been bombarded by ads. Over the last year or so I’ve noticed an uptick in weight loss drug ads. Lately it’s Charles Barkley, smiling as he injects the latest weight loss medication.

Novo Nordisk spent $169 million on Ozempic advertising in 2025, with another $316 million for Wegovy. In the first three quarters of 2025 alone, combined spending pushed past $500 million.

A national study conducted in 2024 found that young people are increasingly drawn to these types of drugs, especially females. The study, conducted by the University of Michigan, found that among young users, 60% were female and 45% were living in the South.

Of course, some people take these medications to help manage diabetes and lower blood sugar, and my contention is not with those uses. Instead, I’m growing more convinced that these companies are taking advantage of young people’s desire for authenticity to push weight loss drugs.

In a 2024 article titled “Authenticity,” Forbes found that Gen Z cares more about authentic experiences than anything else when it comes to product placement and purchase. They desire to know and be known. A study called Gen Z, Values, and Media explores the values Gen Z finds most important, noting that the craving for authenticity arose out of the collapse of the “certainties of modernity” in the face of deep “existential uncertainty.”

At the macro level, there is the leveling of cultural differences through globalization. Christopher Lasch, in The True and Only Heaven, comments that this sense of disassociation derives from the worry many feel about things outside their realm of control. “The capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race,” he writes. “It needs to attach itself to specific people and places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights.” This is why I’m a big proponent of the revival of local communities among Gen Z.

At the micro level, young people are no longer internalizing norms and values but negotiating them based on individual preference. This happens through peer-to-peer sharing and the horizontality of online relationships. A 2007 study found that among young people ages 15 to 24, “health” ranked at the top of their stated priorities. It’s no wonder we see a boom of Gym Culture among millennials and Gen Z.

Alongside this hope for self-improvement, there is also a deep uncertainty among Gen Z — and I believe this is where Ozempic really presses on young people. When you can’t control world events but are constantly bombarded by them, you often convert uncertainty into certainty through personal change. The mantra “be the best you can be” seems fitting here. In the ever-revolving simulacrum of culture shaped by images and video clips, young people are constantly told they need to look a certain way and be a certain way to be happy.

Instagram is notorious for this. Young girls are bombarded with the latest carousel post showing off both body and clothes, conveying the sense that if you don’t look like this, you’re missing out. In many ways it’s a two-edged sword: “Be authentic.” But the authenticity being touted is highly materialistic. It pains me to do research for this piece because even many of the articles written on “authenticity” are targeted towards marketing teams trying to sell to Gen Z.

In the Gen Z study I cited above, respondents listed family, respect, honesty, sincerity, solidarity, friendship, and trust among their top values. One of the films cited by respondents was Fight Club. In the film, an insomniac office worker is completely burned out by the emptiness — the nihilistic impulse — of modern office life. He meets Tyler Durden on a business trip. Tyler does everything the narrator cannot. He’s brave, bold, risky, great with women. He is everything the narrator cannot be — and yet, as we come to find out, Tyler Durden is a manifestation of the narrator’s own split personality. Fight Club is a sharp critique of the empty consumerism of modern society, and in many ways it isn’t far off from the authenticity trap facing hyper-online Gen Zers.

Online life, like Tyler Durden, is a way to overcome the mundanity of everyday existence. I may be a high school student who goes to class every day, but when I’m online, I can be anything I want to be. This is the key to the Ozempic problem. The marketing teams know this. They know that many of the people flocking online are chasing the Tyler Durden fantasy — and that fantasy is exactly what they’re selling.

There is a latent dualism beneath all of this which seeks to pit the self against the flesh. A person thinks they can be more if only they lose weight, build muscle, or change their appearance. And yet people are still miserable.

While social media is central to the everyday life of young people, it’s also making them miserable. One study found that only 15% of Gen Z polled have never felt lonely, compared to 54% of baby boomers. Young people are in one-way relationships with media figures and online personas, forsaking the harder work of in-person relationships. We need an in-person friendship revival.

As companies try to capitalize on the desire for authenticity among young people, it’s more important than ever for Christians to show a better way forward. It’s certainly important to take care of your body, but your body will slowly decay and die. There is so much more to life than that. This is something I’m having to slowly learn. In my early thirties, there are aches and pains I never had to deal with as a twenty-something. But this is normal. Everyone goes through it.

Ozempic may posture as a means to become the real you — the real, skinny you — but the truth is, even if you drop twenty pounds, you aren’t only your body, and you aren’t less than your body. As image-bearers of God, we are more than flesh and blood, but never less than.

This distinction matters more than it might seem. The Ozempic advertisement doesn’t just sell a drug it sells a way of being human, an anthropology if you will. It tells you that the self is trapped inside a body that needs to be corrected, that authenticity is something you arrive at by subtracting from yourself. To be authentically you, you need to inject something synthetic. This is Gnostic. The body is not a problem but the very site of our creaturely dignity. Of course, I’m not arguing for you to sit on the couch and each McDonalds every day. That would be the opposite end of this spectrum — treating your body like it doesn’t matter.

The Christian tradition has always insisted on a right understanding of the body. Just look at the Incarnation — God taking on flesh — as the definitive statement that bodies matter, that the physical world is not a cage but a home. I’m also convinced that churches need to push into the vein that we must live in this reality in the here and now. Too often American Evangelicalism proclaims a gospel of the future — neglecting the present impact of the kingdom.

So, when we eat, work, rest, age, and even gain weight, we are not failing to become our true selves. We are living as creatures, which is precisely what we were made to be. The aches of your early thirties are not something you can escape (as much as I go to the gym throughout the week to try to do so!). They are a reminder that you are finite, embodied, and dependent — and that this is not a tragedy but a gift. There is a beauty in dependency as we age.

What young people are really looking for when they reach for authenticity is not a number on a scale — though marketing teams are selling it as such. It is the sense that they are known, that they matter, that their existence has weight beyond what any mirror can measure. But also that there is something beyond the material. That this life has an underlying structure and order to it that won’t change even when we do. No drug can give them that. But a community that understands them — body and soul, with all their limits intact — can. That is what the Church — the global orthodox body of believers — at her best, has always offered. Not a better body, but a truer home. A place to be known by the One who made you.