Who Am I?
This is one of those Big Questions. The ones that underpin everything else. It lives alongside “Why do we exist?” and “What should I do with my life? and “Am I a good person?”. Even if the question doesn’t have one right answer, it’s still worth asking. Socrates said “Know thyself” and he’s kind of a big deal, so let’s dive in.
I wouldn’t say I’ve ever done specific research on this question. But I’m always paying attention and I’ve taken note of various answers I’ve seen people give. It seems a lot more common to see people explain what they are not rather than what they are. And when I say “what they are” I guess I mean “what we all are, each of us”.
In fact let’s start there. You are not anyone else. You are an individual. Yes, we’re all individuals. That’s why this question is even worth asking in the first place. It’s what makes it worth being alive. Everyone has something unique to offer because nobody else is them. While we do have stuff in common and we’re able to communicate there is nobody who has experienced the exact same set of things as me because I am me and they are not.
Even when we do have a “shared experience” with someone else, we’re not having an identical experience. You are not your circumstances. Two people in the exact same set of circumstances may have a very different reaction to the same situation. You can try putting yourself in someone’s shoes but they’ll never be a perfect fit.
In other, non-Western cultures, this notion is not so clear cut. The concept of Ubuntu doesn’t translate neatly and I can’t say I fully grasp the idea yet. Some people translate it as “I am because we are”, or “We exist through other people”. Let’s try getting away from the philosophers and head to pop culture.
When Jean Valjean asked himself “Who Am I?” he eventually came to terms with being “24601”. But Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner famously said “I am not a number! I’m a free man.” I agree with the latter. You are not a number. Your national insurance number or your passport ID or any of those numbers that can represent you… those are not you. The identifier that represents the thing is separate from the thing itself. So you are not your name either. I am not “Fred Collman”. I mean I am Fred Collman but I am not literally the sequence of letters F-R-E-D-C-O-L-L-M-A-N.
You are definitely not your body. Like the ship of Theseus, every cell in your body will die and be replaced and yet there is still some continuity of the whole. You grow, you change, you become a different person. But you still stay the same person too.
You are not how you are perceived either. There’s a whole bunch of psychological reasons why people will reliably misjudge you. They do not have all of the information. They only see your actions, not your thought process. That means you can take all criticism with a pinch of salt. It doesn’t mean you should reject all feedback. After all, how else would you learn except from others? Everyone knows something you don’t. Their experience isn’t the same as yours, but that’s exactly what makes their their opinions useful.
“You are what you repeatedly do”. This is a quote from William James. It’s paraphrasing an idea from Aristotle who, like Socrates, was kind of a big deal. This feels powerful, in the sense that we have real agency to choose our actions, and therefore define for ourselves who we are.
There’s also a Winifred Gallagher quote that’s pretty similar: “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love, is the sum of what you focus on”. Maybe that’s slightly different though because it’s not just about action it’s also about thoughts.
Descartes thought, and therefore he was. Does that mean you are your thoughts? No. If you wrote down all of your thoughts into a book, would that mean that book is you? No way. What if you stepped into a cloning machine? Your clone would have all the same thoughts and memories as you, but they wouldn’t be you, right?
Jocelyn K Glei asks us to consider “Who are you without the doing?” If you take away all the busyness then what is left? You are not your job. You are not a machine for converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. What is left once you take those things away?
This helps feed into what Arthur C. Brooks says about your identity. You should diversify your identity. The happiest people are those who have many different aspects to our personalities and to our identities. It means that when one particular aspect changes due to circumstances beyond our control, we still have the rest to fall back on. It’s a powerful form of resilience.
I’m not sure how many closer to understanding who I am. But I’ve definitely learnt something along the way. I guess I’m a different person now from the person I was when I first asked this question.