Only fake people have an image to maintain. Be authentic, be genuine, be real, be yourself and you will never have to worry about maintaining an image. But the moment you start faking your character, creating a personality and building a performance around it, things get complicated. Because then your entire life quietly turns into managing that performance every single day. These people actually live in the delusion that no one is smarter than them and no one can figure them out. But in reality, almost everyone already knows what's going on. Some are simply pretending along with them, and some are just playing along to enjoy the show. Half the time they can't even understand when people are being sarcastic instead of praising them. All of that effort just to be liked by everyone, while I'd rather be liked by a few, disliked by some, and not care about a lot of them.