Courtney is haunted by a sinking feeling that everything she does is fake.

She spent time playing sports with artificial rules that made them poor approximations for any real fitness task, and took a lot of classes which neither improved her character noticeably nor taught her anything particularly useful, and volunteered for organizations she didn't care about, and wrote an essay lying about her feelings on all of these. All this got her to yet another opportunity to do similar sorts of fake things, which eventually got her a moderately profitable job making a website load slightly faster.