A waiter who acts too much like a waiter is lying to himself, Sartre said

In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre describes a café waiter whose every gesture is a little too precise, a little too eager, a little too solicitous, performing the role rather than simply living it. Sartre called this "bad faith": denying your own freedom by treating yourself as a fixed object playing a part, rather than a person who could always choose to act otherwise.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness — Gallimard, 1943
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