I am in heaven. Legs dangling off a gondola, pine trees swaying gently in the breeze, bikers in colorful spandex careening down the narrow trails that crisscross on the mountain beneath us. Sweat is beading on my forehead: it turns out that being in heaven makes me feel nauseous and vaguely ill at ease. I keep calculating the distance between my legs and the ground, wondering if I would die or merely break several bones in my body if I were to, say, fall off the gondola during a sudden earthquake.
I have always hated heights. I'm jealous of people who are naturally inclined towards adventure, because I am the opposite: I was born with a deeply ingrained dislike of trying new things. As a kid, in addition to a crippling fear of heights, I hated chlorine, physical exertion, any sport that required hand-eye coordination, being too cold, being too hot, talking to new people, public speaking... basically, discomfort of any kind. All I wanted to do was curl up with a book every moment possible and read without being disturbed.
As an adult I still want to curl up with a book whenever possible, but many of the activities I enjoy are the exact things I used to hate: I love being outdoors, even though the temperature is often too hot or too cold and I get covered with mosquito bites. I like running, despite being supremely unathletic for most of my childhood and dreading the soccer practices my dad forced me into. I'm very comfortable talking to and in front of people. Some of these shifts happened naturally (joining the debate team brought me out of my shell) and some of them happened through very conscious deliberation (I bungee jumped to help me get over my fear of heights), but the process for each was pretty much the same: after subjecting myself to a period of discomfort, my conception of what I enjoyed permanently changed.
In The Princess Bride Westley says: “Life is pain, Princess. Anyone who says differently is selling something." Being temperamentally fearful meant I figured out pretty early on that in order to trying anything new I had to continuously unpeel myself. I never had a fixed idea of me as a person with a fixed identity that came certain likes and dislikes: I had to keep changing, to keep showing up without any fixed notion of my abilities or preferences. In other words, I had to keep renegotiating who I am.
Peter Weinreich defines identity as “the totality of one's self-construal, in which how one construes oneself in the present expresses the continuity between how one construes oneself as one was in the past and how one construes oneself as one aspires to be in the future." Erik Erikson, the German-American psychologist/psychoanalyst who coined the term identity crisis, believed that at different points through someone's life they experienced different conflicts that need to be resolved in order to progress to the next stage. The conflict most relevant to identity happens during your adolescent years and is called “Identity versus Role Confusion." It's the period when teenagers try to figure out who they are in order to form a basic identity that they will build on throughout their life. Erikson believes that this crisis is resolved with identity achievement, the point at which an individual has explored various goals and values, accepting some and rejecting the rest.
James Marcia, building on Erik Erikson's work, developed a structural interview designed to classify adolescents into four different identity statuses:
1. Identity Diffusion (also known as Role Confusion): This is the opposite of identity achievement. The individual has not yet resolved their identity crisis, failing to commit to any goals or values and establish future life direction. In adolescents, this stage is characterized by disorganized thinking, procrastination, and avoidance of issues and action.
2. Identity Foreclosure: This occurs when teenagers accept traditional values and cultural norms, rather than determining their own values. In other words, the person conforms to an identity without exploration as to what really suits them best. For instance, teenagers might follow the values and roles of their parents or cultural norms. They might also foreclose on a negative identity, the direct opposite of their parent's values or cultural norms.
3. Identity Moratorium: This postpones identity achievement by providing temporary shelter. This status provides opportunities for exploration, either in breadth or in depth. Examples of moratoria common in American society include college or the military.
4. Identity Achievement: This status is attained when the person has solved the identity issues by making commitments to goals, beliefs and values after extensive exploration of different areas.
According to Marcia, there are two distinct parts contributing to the achievement of adolescent identity: a time of crisis (i.e. making up your mind), and a time for commitment. You explore for period of time, before eventually committing to a set of beliefs.
Paul Graham has an essay called “Keep Your Identity Small” that points out how it's almost impossible to talk about religion and politics with other people because they're part of people's identities, and people can't have constructive, rational discussions about things that are part of their identities. Similarly, in The Righteous Mind Jonathan Haidt explains how our beliefs come mostly from intuition: we rationalize after the fact, instead of deriving our beliefs from clear thinking. Reason "doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others." Whether we identify as liberal or conservative is often an expression of our "tribal, groupish, righteous nature": our moral intuitions shape our political identity.
PG ends his essay by saying The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you. I mostly agree with that, but one thing that Erikson and Marcia both point out is that we need to commit to an identity in order to continue with our lives. That's obviously true: you have to choose a job, and friends, and media preferences, and political beliefs in order to function in society. If you have no identity whatsoever it's very difficult to pick what to consistently work towards: if I don't set a goal like “I want run a mile at X time three years from now" I'm very likely to never going to do it, and while goals are separate from personal identity, our conception of ourselves obviously hugely influences what we commit to. At the same time, having a fixed identity often restricts you to certain local maxima.
The way to deal with this double-bind might be simply to maintain a flexible identity. Researchers at John Hopkins saw that people who were given a high dose of psilocybin experienced measurable personality change lasting at least a year in the part of the personality known as "openness, which includes traits related to imagination, aesthetics, feelings, abstract ideas and general broad-mindedness." That's pretty cool, since most research indicates that after the age of 30 personality doesn’t usually change significantly. In addition to openness, people who were depressed seemed to be happier after their trips: Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, head of psychedelic research at Imperial, who led the study, said: “We have shown for the first time clear changes in brain activity in depressed people treated with psilocybin after failing to respond to conventional treatments. Several of our patients described feeling ‘reset’ after the treatment and often used computer analogies. For example, one said he felt like his brain had been ‘defragged’ like a computer hard drive, and another said he felt ‘rebooted."
It doesn't take a huge leap to connect the dots: people feel different after tripping (and often better) precisely because they are more open to changes in their identity: some of their previous beliefs about themselves and the world which may been harmful for their well-being have been destroyed. I think a lot of people are stuck on the identity foreclosure state of Marcia's identity status, where we pick identities too early based on our family values and cultural values, and commit to an identity that causes us lasting unhappiness. I'm residing in Utah right now and recently made a weekend trip to Provo, the town where BYU is located. Brigham Young University is an all-Mormon university where all students agree to a Honor Code that prohibits, among other things, substance experimentation (including tea and caffeine) and sex. As a result, nearly 50% of BYU‘s graduating class is married by the time they graduate. Talk about identity foreclosure—you've committed to a religion, a life partner, and quite possibly several children, all before your mid-20s. That's an extreme example, but it's clear that we see less-extreme but still powerful versions of that all the time: 18-year-olds in American decide what they're going to major in, which often hugely influences what field they're going to be working in for the rest of their life. We are encouraged to commit as early as possible to a skillset so we can get ahead. We're told that a fixed identity (knowing who you are and what you stand for) is key to success in life, and so we commit to identities that are hugely influenced by parental pressure, childhood trauma, and social expectations, at a time when we don't have enough self-knowledge to really understand what makes us happy. And then we're surprised when our achievements don't convert to fulfillment.
My theory is that it isn't the people or objects in your life that are the source of your discontent: it's the fact that you've committed to the wrong identity, and some part of you deep inside understands that.
Our current concept of identity is relatively modern and Western, shaped by economic and social factors. In The Century of the Self Adam Curtis highlights how Freud's theories have been repurposed to shape consumer preferences: Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, had a huge impact on corporations and governments, and his influence led directly to contemporary market research centered around the psychoanalysis of products and ideas. He shaped how identity marketing currently works: how we buy a larger house to feel more self-confident, or a new pair of running shoes because we think they might make as powerful and liberated as the athlete in the Nike ad. We buy things as to control our self-image. More insidious: we vote to control our self-image. The notion that our identity is the most fundamental thing about us has become nothing less than a religion.
In Psychopolitics Byung Hyul-Chan writes about how Foucault, when talking about ‘technologies of the self' in the 1980s, did not "see that the neoliberal regime utterly claims the technology of the self for its own purposes: perpetual self-optimization—as the exemplary neoliberal technology of the self—represents nothing so much as a highly efficient mode of domination and exploitation. As an ‘entrepreneur of himself’, the neoliberal achievement-subject engages in auto-exploitation willingly—and even passionately. The self-as-a-work-of-art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains in order to exhaust its resources entirely.
Under neoliberalism, the technology of power takes on a subtle form. It does not take hold of individuals directly. Instead, it ensures that individuals act on themselves so that power relations are interiorized—and then interpreted as freedom. Self-optimization and submission, freedom and exploitation, fall into one."
It's impossible to completely escape the pull of instinct and self-optimization, but my experience has been that I am happiest when I take my identity less seriously and give myself permission to continually renegotiate it. That doesn't mean I don't pursue goals or commit to relationships (I'm not a monk, and therefore still want to function in society), but it means that I try not to wall myself off from continuous change. Living this way, I can give myself more time in identity moratorium: even though I've committed to certain parts of my identity, I try to give myself continuous opportunities for exploration. That means I keep going on ski lifts even though they terrify me, but it also means that I think there's a real possibility I'm wrong about the deepest parts of my identity, including religion and politics. I understand that my identity-construction is influenced by factors beyond my control, and that putting too much faith into it is potentially a trap. Identity seduces and betrays: we think that if we painstakingly craft the right identity it will bring us joy and esteem, but instead it leads to us constantly spinning our wheels, believing that increased control leads to increased happiness.
If we reject the illusion of a fixed identity and keep ourselves open (always staying partially in crisis) we make discovering whom we are and what we're able to do a lifelong project. I love Rachel Cusk paraphrasing D.H. Lawrence: "Some people have a lot farther to go from where they begin to get where they want to be—a long way up the mountain, and that is how it has been for me. I don’t feel I am getting older; I feel I am getting closer.”
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