What is my “True Self”?
It’s really difficult to pin down exactly what it means to be “me”. Some philosophers have talked about the idea that a person’s identity is based on how they act when they think no one is looking. For example, I treat people well, but when I’m alone I like to hack people’s bank accounts to steal money from old people. But I always treat people very decently and have a good reputation. The old people have enough money that they don’t notice a few cents going missing every week. Am I a bad person? I’ve read others say that it’s the way we treat others that defines us. For example, I have a lot of social anxiety. I’m afraid of people a lot and performing even on stream can be scary and overwhelming. But it’s fun and I enjoy it and I put on a good face. Is it my fear that defines me? Or is the joy that I bring other people? Perhaps I’m defined by my intentions with others, rather than how others see me? But what if my intentions are good but I accidentally hurt people? Maybe I deserve to be defined, at least in part, by the pain I’ve caused rather than what my intentions were? We can go around and around literally forever. I think it’s kind of a mix of everything.
Who says there even has to be one “self” instead of a combination of lots and lots and lots of different smaller things? Human beings register memory as a previous experience through a continuous consciousness, but I think this kind of gives this false idea that a person is just oneself which changes over time instead of a combination of multiple selves working in tandem with each other to create one coherent simulation of existence. Identity is complicated and confusing, and philosophers have been arguing for decades over what it means and how we define it. Who says you need to figure out for certain who you are? Sure, you can start to ask yourself what you believe in and what you hope for in the future, but to presume with any form of certainty that at any point in your life, you will be able to say with complete clarity “[this] is who I am” is incredibly presumptuous and removes you of the ability to change and grow in the future. It minimizes the complexity of the human condition to a series of labels, fears, and stated belief/value structures.
Think of it like a blackhole; a structure with so much mass compacted into such a tight area that light itself cannot even escape it, continuously expanding and growing and it pulls more things in the longer it exists to grow. At what point do you consider the black hole at its “peak” or its most “self”? The only true answer is never, for it is constantly expanding as it takes in more information. In the same way, you continue growing and learning with every second that you exist on this planet. You can kind of get a general idea of who you are based on the kinds of people you surround yourself with, the political stances you hold, the things you are afraid of, the things that make you happy, the ways you express yourself, etc; but I think that, in the same way that it’s impossible to measure the mass of a black hole without ourselves following into it, it’s impossible to grasp with complete clarity what it means to be “yourself” unless you are willing to stop growing/changing once you put a label on yourself.
For example, if I say “I am a hippie who loves helping others and suffers from imposter syndrome,” I am ignoring all of the weird quirkiness and neurodivergent behaviors I fall into. This was what made designing “Wesdbot” so difficult. (For context, Wesdbot is an AI bot version of myself that will sometimes pop in on streams. Designing this bot took months and is arguably very different from me. But it thinks it is me. But I think I am me. Which one is the “real” Weston? Neither? Both? What if there isn’t such a thing as one definitive “version” of myself, but just lots of different iterations throughout time?)
The only way to describe yourself with so much clarity that it gives a completely accurate image of who you are would be if you spent hours upon hours upon weeks upon weeks writing and writing tiny little things that have inspired/affected you that by the time you got done, that experience writing that piece would, in itself, have changed your perspective on the world to such a degree that the version of yourself described in the writings would be inherently different to the person reading the description afterward.
In other words, no one is ever fully done “cooking.” No one is ever fully complete. We are constantly changing and growing, and that is what makes human beings–both living as one and watching them from the outside–so immaculately beautiful! Every person is different and unique and beautiful, and we are all growing and learning and evolving. The point is, it’s okay not to have it all figured out right now. As long as you treat people well (what you imagine in your head when you visualize what it means to treat someone well is incredibly subjective and in itself could help you start to establish some basis of understanding for your identity), that’s the important bit. Just do what you think is right and chase what life will make you happy. As you do more and explore what happiness looks like for you, you will naturally learn more about yourself and you will be able to get a clearer picture of who you are through the ways you act and interact with others.
