What can I, personally, do to "draw power and self-worth directly from my identity"?
…this explains a lot.
(i.e. “there are people who don’t do that?”)
I’ve been trying to think of a response that fully describes how I feel about this thing but…this seems like it becomes more complicated when you’re actually a moral realist. Like, being happy personally is great, but I want to make sure I don’t… the phrase my brain is generating here is “get high on my own supply.” I wanna make sure that whatever self-mythologizing I do doesn’t start to take over my objective, ground-level assessment of reality and of whether I’m making the world a better place.
Secondly, I have a hard time thinking of myself as an interesting and noteworthy person in a world where the vast majority of people are boring and mediocre. Even among the ones who aren’t, they still kinda are in the sense that they’re not really all that noteworthy in a world of 7 billion people. Quick: who’s the current leader of MI5? You probably don’t know, because despite being in the top 0.001% of spies (number pulled out of my ass), he’s doesn’t have much in the way of actual influence over world affairs, and isn’t a big enough deal to be a household name. You can accomplish that much and still be a footnote.
Thirdly: https://local.theonion.com/woman-struggling-to-contort-dreams-ambitions-into-shap-1819578642
This question deserves more in the way of a response than I’m going to provide here. Y’know, something on the order of “years of dedicated thought put into years’ worth of serious writing.”
But, in (very) brief:
1. Perform meditative/cognitive exercises. Think seriously about the kind of person you want to be, as seen from the outside – not just in an everyday instrumental/practical kind of way, not just in terms of “what you want to get done [that you haven’t already done],” but in a holistic and, uh, character-driven way. What kind of traits and quirks do you want to display? What kind of impression do you want the Cosmic Akashic Audience to come away with, after seeing you in action? To the extent you don’t live up to the image that this process generates, try to do so. More to the point, to the extent that you do (which is likely to be very considerable), take the time to consciously recognize and consider that fact. You are (in some measure) the person that you want to be. Isn’t that great? Doesn’t it seem like you should be reveling in that fact, and indeed using it for something structural, rather than letting it gather dust in the back shelves of your mindscape?
(To be absolutely clear: stripped of its self-help-y phrasing, this is to some extent calling for a values / utility-function shift in most people. I am recommending that you focus on moving away from a methodology that checks well-being in terms of having things and having done things and experiencing things towards one that checks well-being in terms of being things. Which, in my experience, is a very natural way for people to deal with envy and with external things-they-find-cool but not at all a natural way for them to deal with themselves on a day-to-day basis.)
2. Acquire personal symbols, use them liberally, and encourage those who care about you to employ them as appropriate. It’s very easy to feel like all the things that make you cool are just part-of-the-fabric-of-the-world, that you partake in the same actions and thoughts as a million other people and that your version of them isn’t particularly special or meaningful. Heraldry, catchphrases, etc. allow you to “tag” an instance of a thing as being particularly associated with you, so that at such time as it generates worthwhile results you funnel the ensuing reward towards your own identity. In lame normie language, this is “building your brand” on a micro-level.
As an additional bonus, this process creates a positive resonance between yourself (from which you want to draw welfare) and various symbols that you presumably find cool (from which you are already drawing welfare).
3. Identify and attack the anti-identitarian memes that are floating around your own mind, insofar as they’re worth attacking. None of this psychological program I’m pushing here is “natural,” but we do make it a lot harder than it has to be by actively denigrating the psychological state of (literal) self-satisfaction. And you can always just, y’know, try to stop doing that. Probably you don’t want to mess around with your core ideals here, but…probably you won’t have to in order to get something good out of this.
Idealizing accomplishment is fine, but remember that a lot of concrete accomplishment devolves to some combination of luck and willingness-to-sell-out, and it may be better to reframe it as idealizing “being the kind of person who actually does the kinds of things that generate accomplishment.” Being a hedonic consequentialist is fine (I guess), but the world is terrible at reliably providing the raw stuff of happiness and our brains are even worse at processing it, so it might be worthwhile to put some of your eggs in the basket of “being the kind of person who seeks to make a happier world.” Etc.
More later, perhaps, as I think on this.
FITCHBURG, WI—Exerting a considerable amount of mental effort on twisting and reshaping the dreams she’s held since she was a child, local woman Abby Bowers reportedly struggled this week to contort her personal goals and ambitions into the shape of a dental technician. “The hours certainly aren’t bad, and it pays pretty well, plus I like working with people—I could definitely be happy being a dental tech,” said Bowers, straining to apply sufficient pressure to her educational and professional aspirations to forcibly bend them into something resembling a two-year track at a local technical college and a career repairing bridges and crowns. “I’ve always really liked science, and I’d get to take a biology course if I do this. And I wouldn’t have to work holidays, which is nice. It’s actually a really great career.” At press time, Bowers was laboring to mentally pare her lifelong passion for music down to the size of a hobby pursued only in free moments on the weekend.
First thing:
This is a good and serious objection. The best and most serious objection, as far as I’m concerned. There’s clearly a sense in which identity-building can lead into delusion, and if you have truth-apprehension as a terminal value – as I do, and if you’re reading this, I suspect that you probably do too – that’s a scary thing.
There are workarounds and patches. (Having an identity as “someone who sees and believes the truth, even when it’s painful and dissonant” can work wonders.) But on the most abstract level…yeah, there’s nothing for it but to admit that identity and truth-apprehension sometimes conflict, in much the way that human happiness and truth-apprehension sometimes conflict. Prioritize and resolve as per your favored metaethic.
Second thing:
As others have said, there are definite ways in which this kind of thinking betrays a construction of concepts like “interesting” and “noteworthy” that is…certainly not intellectually mandatory, and probably not even very consistent with other values that you hold.
It’s tempting to think of fame, influence, and rank as proxies for the things we care about. The best scientist is the one who gets cited all the time and the one whose name everyone knows, etc. But in most ways this is a patently terrible heuristic; it’s convenient and easy, but it replaces measurements of the things we care about with measurements of things that we expressly don’t. The way you become famous is to attention-whore super hard and to optimize for catchiness above other values. The way you rise through the ranks is by paying attention to politics. And if you’re really into the idea of Being a Scientist, or whatever, you probably don’t want to invest lots of ego into politics or attention-whoring.
There are probably a lot of really top-notch spies working in MI5 who are way better, as spies, than the director will ever be. Culture is set up to make this hard to recognize, even for them. Don’t be fooled.
I think of it in fictionalization terms, because that’s how my mind works. If you’re reading a story, it’s usually possible to tell whether a given character Does the Thing in a resonant or admirable way, just by looking at him and what he thinks / says / does – you don’t need lots of external social cues. So just look at your own life, and the lives of the people who matter to you, in that way.
Third thing:
This Onion piece is actually a really good illustration of why identitarian construction is important, and how its absence can fuck you up psychologically.
(ahem)
I have a day job. It pays reasonably well, and it’s not very stressful, and good Lord is it boring. This is, as far as I’m concerned, a pretty good setup; I have enough money to lead a decently comfortable lifestyle, and I have the time and the energy to do the things I care about – the things that make me me – without having to fret over whether I can somehow manage to find someone to pay me to do them. Better yet, I can actually work on the actual projects I want to do, rather than marketable things that vaguely resemble those projects if you squint.
The reason that this works is that I’ve actually put some independent work into building my identity. I know who I am. I don’t need an employer to confirm it for me. I know a lot of very-smart very-driven people who haven’t done this, and who therefore have their self-conception tied to the vagaries of the marketplace and of social recognition, and they are fucked.
Maybe Abby Bowers’s real dream was to be an astronaut, or a secret agent, or something, and she just didn’t have the chops or the motivation to make it happen. That would be very sad, but them’s the breaks, it happens. Narcissistic injury is a real thing.
BUT – maybe her real dream was to be a writer. Or a philosopher. Or a witch. Or a beloved beautiful princess. Or, indeed, a scientific innovator, as the text vaguely suggests. Those are all dreams that lots of people have. And she can still do them! Any of them! Nothing is stopping her! Better yet, she can do them while making dental-technician money, and thus enjoying a middle-class lifestyle instead of struggling through poverty!
She won’t, though, because she doesn’t have an identity to guide her. She’s looking to the world to hand her one, and the one that it’s offering is “dental technician.” It’s a damn shame.