Philosophy | Life Lessons

The Question of the Self

Practicing detachment from ourselves

It will not be at all thoughtless to think that we live in a constant and all-encompassing identity crisis.

The search for the meaning of the self has painted the story of adventures, from reality to fiction or even at the intersection of both. We are, after all, eternal tellers of our own story.

The idea of being history creates, right from the start, an identity crisis: are we our story or the tellers of our story? And if we tell it, is it no longer ours?

It seems to me that, nowadays, we live a permanent escape from the “I” in an attempt to define it successfully, but without it. First of all, we need a basis of identification, structure, of concepts of the self that are as many as subjectivity.

After all, who are we?

We could say that we are the set of our thoughts. Thoughts that are transformed into convictions and beliefs and these, consequently, give rise to actions and, therefore, intervention in the world.

It is a mark that appears to be ours, an inheritance that will endure in the minds of those who live with us. But if thoughts are also interpretations of the world, don’t they themselves create various external identities of the self in that which is the other?

Or, we can also ask, are we the thoughts if we don’t know where they come from? Or, again, are we the thoughts if they could be a reflection of our own environment? We will thus live trapped in eternal circular reasoning, in which we are both creator and creation.

Still, the idea of creation can be used in the search for identity. We think of a concept of supra-human fulfillment in artistic activities, which are imminently creative, as opposed to a notion of work of necessity that empties humanity to some extent.

Are we what we create? And, if we are, who doesn’t create, ceases to be?

That being is, today, imminently digital and, also, history. The advent of social networks has given rise to a multiplicity of selves that, although they may have always existed, have been exacerbated by the immediacy of the online world.

We are constantly telling the story of our lives to our “followers,” but just as the novelist manipulates reality, giving it literary characteristics, so each of us does so in this constant story on our profiles.

The word will not be random, in the sense that we are constantly in an exercise of self-definition whose objectives are diluted in a fog of identities.

This multiplicity of selves that are created in the various online profiles aggravates an identity crisis that doesn’t seem to have a solution, being trapped by a thread of instant creations or improved realities. We distance ourselves from the goal of defining ourselves in order to fit into profiles and labels defined by an entity society that is, in the end, a huge sum of undefined identities.

And this distancing we create from ourselves, in the vain attempt to receive a validation of existence that seems a sine qua non condition for living today, from other beings seeking the same validation, creates an inner existential dilemma in the process of achieving the identification we want: are we sprouting from ourselves to others, trying to complete ourselves in them, or are we constantly defining ourselves from the outside in, gluing together shreds of empty expressions that are propagated in public discourse?

So…

The dilemma of detachment is the dilemma of our days. We need to understand the correct scale of these various distances: from ourselves, from others, from our sense of identity, from our thoughts, from our actions.

We should distance ourselves from ourselves so that we can see ourselves, as Saramago said, but not enough so that we don’t get lost in that process of identification corrupted by a world, itself, in a crisis of identity.

Before you go…

Did you enjoy reading my story? How about becoming a member here on Medium? Your membership fee, only 5$/month, will give you the opportunity to read all the stories you want while supporting me and other writers to continue to bring you insights every day. Click here to become a member.