Perhaps part of the reason people have difficulties with ~identity~ is that the goal of identity is really to balance two needs: individual self-expression and finding a group where one belongs. They don’t necessarily cut against each other, but they often can. An identity that was perfectly tailored to you would be an awkward fit for anyone else. Any identity-based group will have to cast a wider net. But group membership isn’t really presented an explicit goal in our culture. The narrative we present is largely about ~being yourself~, with an implicit but not necessarily correct assumption that you will find an appropriate group to be part of at the end of your journey. So you get identities forming along lines that aren’t conducive to group membership. E.g. they’re too specific or they don’t focus on traits that are relevant for making a group function. Sexuality in a loose sense makes plenty of sense as a criterion for group membership, but overly particular labels for sexuality don’t. There’s nothing wrong with using them for self-understanding, but they can’t totally fulfill what one needs from an identity.
“Keep your identity as narrow as possible while still having friends and living within a workably large social network” might be the implication. To a certain extent, of course, people understand this implicitly and act accordingly, but making the tradeoffs more obvious might aid in better construction of one’s identity (or identities).
I think I’d argue almost exactly the opposite—but I’m probably wrong for the same reason as usual.
My claim would be that most people’s identities are way too centered on how other people view them: that people develop identities almost purely in a group-centric way. People label themselves for consumption and understanding by other people—and thus pigeonhole themselves for group membership.
And my “anti-identity” quest is a quest to get people less worried about group membership and where they belong. I’ve written before that I don’t want to belong to a group, and the feeling of fitting in actually makes me somewhat uncomfortable.
And while I wouldn’t wish discomfort on anyone, in general, I think that this attitude is “more right” in some ways. That once you let your identity get held hostage to conforming to your group, it’s harder for you to be the person you authentically want to be, and who comports with your own values.
(And the “usual” reason that this is wrong is that it’s what @balioc calls the path of enlightenment. It requires you to not care if you don’t fit in and a bunch of people dislike you and/or think you’re weird).
A couple of different parts of my theory are getting conflated here.
The fundamental root difficulty of human existence, in some sense, is the same Problem of Suffering that the Buddha noted: we are unhappy/unfulfilled/existentially despairing/however-you-want-to-frame-it. There are a few different strategies for dealing with this. There is the experiential path, in which you try to have a bunch of interactions with the world that make you happy rather than sad; there is the narcissistic path, in which you try to build up a psychic construct inside yourself that you find fulfilling; and then there’s the path of enlightenment, in which you deal with pain and failure basically by ceasing to care about them, by regarding your entire individual existence as a contingent illusion, by coming to regard the concept of “goal” as meaningless. This last (I assert) is incredibly difficult and counterintuitive, so much so that only a handful of people in any given generation have ever made any real progress towards it, and for normal human make-the-world-OK purposes we might as well ignore it.
Once you’re on the narcissistic path, once you’re trying to Have an Identity in the first place, you are faced with further strategic choices. One of the most important ones is: to what extent do I try to maintain this psychic construct purely through my own internal strength, and to what extent do I try to prop it up by receiving validation for it through my interactions with others? This is a balancing question. Narcissism completely fails to work if you need _constant _validation, if your identity has no internal durability at all; then you might as well not have it in the first place, and try to make it on the experiential path. On the other hand, it’s often very difficult to believe in yourself without any input whatsoever, and external validation can pack a lot of psychological punch. (This is often true for structural reasons that are inherent to a given identity, since identities are often social or partly social.)
In general, I do think that it is plausible and worthwhile for people to become better at believing in their own identities, and I encourage psychological programs that cultivate this effect. That said, I _also _believe that it is plausible and worthwhile for people to become better at providing useful kinds of narcissistic validation for each other, and I _also _encourage programs along those lines.
I’m probably going to write a real essay about this at some point, but since the point is being raised now…
Socially speaking, identity serves two main functions, which are directly opposed to one another and exist in tension. It justifies group affiliation, which is the thing being talked about here – and it also distinguishes individuals from each other.
People have a need to belong, and thus they cultivate aspects of their identity that allow them to connect to others. “I’m a good Christian, so it totally makes sense that I’m part of this church with all these other good Christians!” “I fit under the LGBT umbrella, so you all should recognize me as one of Your People!”
But people also need to be special, to be individual, to be themselves, and it is beneficial to them when the people around them recognize and acknowledge this special individuality. One way or another, this usually takes the form of playing up distinctions and differences. Sometimes it’s a matter of having a special role in the local community – “I’m the baby of the group, everyone cossets and indulges and adores me, and I play into that by being delightful and non-threatening.” Sometimes it’s a matter of having a superlative trait that you want to be prominently displayed in your identity – “I identify as being the Goth One, so I’m going to be conspicuously broody and spooky and depressing in my social interactions, so that others give me my due as gother-than-they.” Sometimes it’s just a matter of being distinct for distinctiveness’s sake – “I wear orange, because that’s My Color around here.” When this is successfully achieved, you feel that you have specific value rather than being interchangeable with others, and also that you have been successfully mapped to the particular individual story that you’re trying to embody narcissistically.
(This differentiating-identity thing, I think, is the part that gets massively underappreciated within the existing identity discourse.)
The same trait can serve both functions in different contexts. If you identify as Really Smart, well, that can manifest as an attempt to display that you’re Smart Enough to be a member in good standing of the Smart People’s Club – or as an attempt to show that you are the Smartest Guy in the Room through ritual dominance displays – or, likely, both, depending on where you find yourself.
But with regard to @femmenietzsche’s original point: the guy claiming to be a trisexual demigender panromantic squidkin is very clearly not aiming to fit in. But he’s also probably not just speaking straight from the heart in an uncomplicated way. He is specifically making a social gambit for narcissistic purposes; he wants to be seen as different, so he’s playing that up. And this serves a real social function, as much as group-membership does.