Comment by wmccullough | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wmccullough | Hacker News Reader

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I would like to add another viewpoint from my own real world experiences.

Many people know who they really are deep, deep down. I find that most of the life long struggle is just to be, and express who we know ourselves to be.

I'm sure there are plenty of people that do not genuinely know who they are, and it's hard to blame them. In my 30s, I feel like our generation as born, lived, and died with extreme amounts of advertising and promotion in front of our faces.

The only thing that scares me more than not having an implicit identity is having an identity that is driven by so much consumption that you believe you need to buy the Crest Whitestrips, do squats for a bigger butt, or person who has lots of Starbucks Star Rewards. No disrespect to those goals in their own right, self-improvement is always a noble cause to me, but I fear of people just becoming: Guy with the good teeth, girl with the Kardashian butt, or person who knows every piece of Starbucks lingo.

I genuinely mean it when I say that I hope that folks don't allow their identity to be supplanted by everything that the glowing box says we should be. I hope we don't become as unique as the sum of our corporate fingerprints, but perhaps we should accept that corporate fingerprints are allowed to be part of us too.

There is no pretending here, I'm not anymore free of this than anyone else, but I sometimes think this is why the world (and to some extent Americans) say that if you leave milk and America by themselves, only one of them will develop a culture. We have the unfortunate chance of being a nation that developed in a relatively modern era with more advertising being done in the last two hundred years than in the entire span of human history (note: I have no proof of this, this is purely conjecture on my part)

P.S. I apologize if this came off as preachy in any way. I love humanity and I get sad thinking about people living and dying without ever knowing who they really are. This just ended up becoming a stream-of-conciousness type post more than anything.

I'm skeptical of the idea that if we just looked deep enough we'd find our "genuine" selves. As if we were the representation of some platonic ideal of ourselves.

Also, assuming such a thing does exist, why assume it would be a good thing to find it. Reminds me of Rousseau vs Hobbes.

I'm skeptical too. Keep searching for your "true self" and you may not find anything there. Like a hurricane, it has a name, a shape, tendencies, but can appear and fade away into material substrate. While we might say the hurricane has a personality, it's affected by the conditions around it (wind, temperature, etc...). We get angry when our life is threatened and we get angry when the ego is threatened, but was that upset ego you? Or was it a reflection of shape of the comments directed at it? Who are you?

I find you will have better results thinking about what has MADE you the way that you are, rather than trying to FIND what you are.

Learning about how my childhood has affected my adult psyche has been more revealing than trying to find some static inner "me." I think your "you" is nebulous and ever changing. I would go as far as to say relative and situational, even. But you can learn about your patterns of thought by reverse engineering them, both in real-time and historically.

If you do this enough you will find a pattern that you can define as yourself. Then it turns into a game of playing to that pattern's strengths and stress-testing it for growth.

I've always thought of "true self" as the intersection between:

  + Who other's think you are
  + Who you think you are
  + Who you actually are

If all three of those are in harmony, you've found "your true self." Nothing more, nothing less.

Anthropomorphization of hurricanes is not exactly evidence that there is nothing at the center of human beings. It's simply an analogy and analogies are by their nature imperfect and inexact.

If that projection of hurricane weather phenomena appeals to you as a model for human existence, it may speak more to your own understanding of human existence rather than the reverse.

There appear to be some universal aspects of human existence: joy, hope, longing, loneliness, happiness, anger, melancholy. Needs for acceptance and belonging, external purpose beyond eating and excreting.

To say that there is nothing there at the center of our selves cannot be accurate, in my mind.

True self, is not some alternative universe you need to connect with, it literally means being true and authentic to yourself. Its your actions aligning with the values and beliefs you've managed to collect over your lifetime. When you meet someone who is authentic, you can just sense it.

I don't think it is as simple as just looking inside and boom, there it is. Discovering yourself I think is a long process. I think it begins when you learn to quit lying to yourself about who you are.

I hate to go all "woo woo", but mindfulness was the first step for me. Getting out of the habit of blocking thoughts and clearing my mind has allowed me discover a lot about who I want to be.

I certainly agree with the last part of your comment. In my opinion, mindfulness and meditation, and learning how to stop identifying ourselves with irrational, uncontrolled thought processes are steps in the right direction.

Oddly enough I don't think people who have 'found' themselves necessarily have found some genuine self. Rather they've found something permanent and stable to latch onto. Given OPs thoughts about media/advertising these days, it could be said that we don't get enough permanent stuff to fashion an identity out of in mainstream culture. Part of the MO of advertising is always changing and building a need up for products. That implies a heightened impermanence to our mainstream culture.

> we'd find our "genuine" selves

Maybe think about it this way: what are your very _deepest_ values? The things that you think make a life worth living? That's starting to touch your genuine self.

To find who you really are you must be in difficult situations where there are decisions to be made, and see what decisions you make, and how you feel about them afterwards.

The crisis of self-identity, if we call it that, isn’t helped by pervasive ads sure, but the root cause is easy living, the economic conditions which give rise to ads...

“All Greeks know what is right, but only the Spartans do it”

I have wondered my whole life how we would all speak and behave, if we hadn't seen examples of so many interpersonal situations in TV and movies.

It's not wholly negative. Unintentionally or not, media provides extensive education-by-example of behaviors to avoid, far beyond the cartoon villain.

I'm not concerned about any moral or social-grace aspects. I'm concerned about authenticity. I wouldn't mind if I knew my examples were family and real-life role models. But when I'm in a dramatic situation in my life, I do wonder whether I'm rehashing a performance synthesized from sitcoms.

I guess it depends on your preferences- e.g. would you rather be an inauthentic good parent, or an authentically terrible parent?

You're putting too much moral value in media. Think of how many TV shows & movies put adolescent rebelling in a good light, puts value in materialism, or highly correlates good/bad behavior and storyline importance with character attractiveness.

We're probably thinking of different examples, but to me it's not morality- it's more like the exploration of unintended consequences. If you act like X, what unintended consequence Y might come about? I have always felt like hearing the stories of other people, good or bad, makes it easier to think about new-to-me circumstances. To borrow two popular quotes:

- A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one

- Experience is the teacher of all things

I don't disagree with that, but pop media is particularly inaccurate at teaching the consequences of parenting, good or bad.

Wasn't preachy, made sense to me :). Thanks for it, I've had lots of vague thoughts swirling around about this.

Perhaps we become who we are through what we pursue. So if we never wade beyond the tide of 'low' goals pushed upon us by that glowing box, we end up the simplistic people you mention above (good teeth etc.).

But do we have an innate identity that's being supplanted by consumerism, or are these just the easiest, most available goals, and so we create our identity from these shallow things?

So perhaps it's less that this shallow self-knowledge is externally imposed over our innate deep self-knowledge, and more that we're simply shallow people because we've set shallow goals.

Maybe we realize our potential and develop that 'real' identity by looking up, aiming higher...

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