Unless we’re merely trying to survive, we’re always purposing ourselves toward a set of values, and we call that collective pile our “identity”.
These values we identify with are an image we’ve created through self-observation of our daily lives:
- Pastimes, consumer goods, trends, and heroes.
- Physical things like sexuality, psychological diagnosis, race, or social class.
- Friends and social groups.
- Long-term purposes like career, family, and legacy.
- Raw principles and concepts or understanding of specific things.
- Absence of a thing (e.g., “not pretty enough”, “stupid”, “weak”).
- Hatred of a thing (e.g., hating a father or political party).
Things we identify with are often responses to our environment, and typically compared with other things. We frequently identify with how much we conform to group standards.
Identity has very little to do with what we are or are doing, but is always associated with our purposes. A person may work a job full-time and go to school but will identify with something they only do 5 hours a week or merely wish to do.
Even with multiple people doing the same things, they will regularly identify with philosophically unique elements. Two people may identify with a company they work at, for example, but from entirely different values they relate with the company.
If we keep living life well, we spend more time doing new things than making conscious choices to identify with them.
The name for a thing holds tremendous power through giving certainty about something’s presence. It logical separation from other things represents into how we see that thing in relationship to other things, and at the farthest extreme can often create religious implications.
Shifting
Assuming we’re gaining maturity and are mentally well, we tend to cycle through various identifiers over time as we understand more comparisons about reality and broaden our sense of self. Our childhood identities will combine to generate most of how we build our personalities.
We tend to distinguish ourselves as “special” compared to others. This may represent as a strong difference in qualities, or it might be in how we see things, or ways our beliefs are different from others’. Generally, though, more unites people than differentiates them.
With enough time and introspection, certain values will surface to reflect what we like to relate to.
We tend to make subconscious decisions that conform reality to our identity, which hold tremendous influence over our minds. Those decisions adapt our expectations about the future to forecast past trauma revisiting or empower us to succeed through visualization.
If we suffer addiction, that substance is our creative constraint for all of an identity, meaning everything filters through it. This creates a type of animal-like essence as we neglect their soul’s more complex needs.
Choices
A wide variety of things happen to us, but we decide, consciously or not, which values to prioritize. Identity is the “greatest hits” of a person to answer “who am I?” and is one of the most important sets of habitual thoughts in a person.
Our identities are always decisions, though those decisions are often not conscious. We usually choose our identity by the perceived benefits we can acquire through associating with something, but we can sometimes identify through a strong belief in something we’re afraid of that gives no benefit.
We have “authentic” identities when we have created an original mix of our observed values that most closely conform to what we prefer. Otherwise, we can conform to our culture by stating back and repeating exactly what we understand others want. This isn’t always better, but necessary for understanding ourselves, and often requires us to reach at least age 35-40 to get there.
Nobody ever considers themselves to be average or typical. Even though most of what we are is very similar to all the rest of humanity, we like to think our idiosyncratic details have far more value than what we have in common with everyone else. It’s sometimes better than everyone else (e.g., easy tasks) and sometimes worse (e.g., hard tasks), but we sincerely believe ourselves (both flaws and strengths) to be uniquely important in some way.
The ideas we focus on and words we choose play a massive part of our identity because they determine how we frame the stories of ourselves. These decisions may be helpful or hurtful, context-sensitively, depending on the results they create with our environment.
We must decide to identify with good things, and to resist hardship, if we want to live the good life.
Application
Whenever we experience new changes, our identity will likely change. In fact, major components of personalities change whenever people make life decisions like marry or move.
Identity fluctuates and shifts around all the time, and is a product of continuous learning and growth. Slowing our changes in identity is a sign that we’re not growing.
We all want to be “special”, but we’re not. There are over 7,000,000,000 people on the planet right now, with billions more who were once born, and it’s very likely that someone on Earth is or was precisely like you in every way. This fact makes most people uncomfortable, so it’s usually taboo to tell people that individually.
We tend to identify with ourselves in the present tense, as if “now” us is more the “self” than the version of us from ten years ago. In reality, the difference between that person and now is only the product of all the habits, decisions, and consequences we’ve experienced since then. Those experiences are enough to give us more in common with our peers than our past self, and the future version of us will be the same.
The easiest way to detect what others identify with is to see them when they’re experiencing changing circumstances. That person will choose to keep what they identify with, even when they deny or feel shame over it. Often, abrupt decisions come from those specific identifiers they’ve finally made a move toward.
We control and associate with things in our environment, such as our bodies, tools, and vehicles, but those results are a degree removed from our true selves, which are far more immaterial and tied closely to our decisions.
Generally, we do better by identifying with things we can control instead of things given to us from our environment (internal vs. external locus of control). If it’s beyond our control or influence, we must trust other things to keep our identity compliant with reality. We’re usually born with an external locus of control and must learn to focus only on what we can control.
People who use clichés and trite sayings aren’t being authentic with their language because they’re afraid of what others may think or what they may learn about themselves, and observers can see it clearly.
The more we identify with things, the more we make any experience associated with those things personally associated (and therefore experience more emotions about them).
Everyone wants to be important, so they identify with whatever can make them important. Importance is the value other people place on someone, each person is trying to gain a reputation for something and responding to consequences for a positive end. The only exception to this is when the person cares more for themselves than others.
Our name holds tremendous power, whether we hear it or express others’ names.