A Very Short Essay: There Is No Intrinsic 'You', Living Without the Social Lanyard
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." — Kurt Vonnegut
You ask people the question, "Who are you?" They'll tell you their name, and you realise that they haven't actually answered the question— they've told you the label, the name that's on their social 'lanyard'.
You ask them again, and they'll tell you their roles, you ask them again. You realise people can hardly ever describe, most people can't fundamentally describe who they are without defining themselves by their roles.
The question "Who are you?" assumes the existence of a stable, intrinsic self. But if identity is just an emergent abstraction, then the question itself is flawed—it presupposes something that may not actually exist.
If all we do is go through life mechanistically, just responding to stimuli, surviving, and conforming to the social algorithm without being aware of it, then we aren't fundamentally different from other animals. One of the only things that truly sets us apart is the ability to reflect on our own existence and seek meaning beyond survival. I'd argue that a chimpanzee doesn't sit on its deathbed contemplating whether it lived authentically or whether it wasted its life on illusions. But humans do. We have the ability to ask, "Did I truly live?"—and the capacity to feel the weight of that question. If you die having truly confronted your existence, having pursued something beyond biological and social imperatives—perhaps that's really what separates humans from animals.
We are conscious, perhaps we even have free will— yet, many live their lives 'unconsciously conscious'; conscious of their perception, conscious of reality, but not conscious of their own social performance. The thought provoking question remains: Are our identities defined by our social roles? Or is it something deeper; or perhaps the question itself is flawed and we can only be defined mechanistically? Perhaps there is no intrinsic "you"; the you today will not be the same as the you next week or the you from three years ago—there is only a you relative to the social algorithm.