Your identity is the story you tell about your actions in the world, but it’s also your actions in the world. It’s the structure from which the plans that you implement in the world originates, and you’re always acting in the world. You have problems to solve all the time. There’s all sorts of problems you have to solve to stay alive because you’re not only who you are right now and how you feel right now — you’re this strange entity that exists right now but that already existed in the past and that is going to repeat itself into the future.
I want to be a conscientious person. I need to get out of bed at eight o’clock. I need to get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. I need to have breakfast within the first half hour that I’ve woken up. I need to be able to go get groceries because otherwise I won’t have any breakfast to cook. Your identity is a — it’s like a dramatic role that you play out in the world, and while playing that out, it has to furnish you with a life. It means that it has to be negotiated with other people.
When you’re a very young child and you first start to play with who you are, you live in a fantasy world. And if you’re a child and you want friends, then you can’t insist that only your game be played. You’re motivated to pursue something, you pursue it, and what you want happens. Not only do you get what you want, but you get validation for the structure that governs your perceptions and your actions. When you don’t get what you want, then a landscape of questions emerges, and those questions can resonate through different levels of your identity — from the trivial (“Oh, I told the joke wrong”) to the profound (“There’s nothing desirable about me, and I’ll be alone for the rest of my life”). The idea, for example, that your identity is whatever you say it is and that everyone else has to go along with that — no.
That isn’t how it works, partly because no one even knows how to go along with it. See, if you have a functional identity, when you act it out in the world, then you get what you want and need. It has to go through that period before you can emerge as a genuine individual, which means you have to know the rules of the game before you can break them. If you act out your identity — if you act out your beliefs in the world — and what you want doesn’t happen, what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action. And the reason for that is you’ve wandered too far away from the campfire, and now you’re in the forest. And so, what do you do then? And the answer is: well, you don’t know what to do. So, what do you do when you don’t know what to do? And the answer is: you prepare to do everything. And the problem with that is that it’s unbelievably draining — like, it hurts you.
People stay where what they do has the results they want. It’s very hard on us not to be where we know that what we want is going to happen. We hate that — we hate that — and no wonder. You can really be where you don’t know what’s going to happen, or you can only be there to some degree. You might ask: well, why? And the answer is: well, because you can be hurt — pain. You can be damaged. You can become intolerably anxious. And you can die. So it’s no wonder you’re sensitive — or very sensitive — to negative emotion.
Functional identity regulates your emotion. Most of your sanity is socially distributed. If you’re acceptable to your peers and you behave well, they’ll accept you, and then they tell you all the time if you’re acting appropriately, if your jokes are funny, if you’re dominating the conversation, if you’re bringing something of value to the table. And all you have to do is pay attention to the social cues, and you’ll keep yourself regulated.
You know, maybe your mood would be better if you got up at eight o’clock in the morning regularly instead of two or four in the afternoon irregularly. And then you say: well, we don’t really know if that’s true. Let’s try getting up at two regularly for a week and see what happens, and then maybe we’ll try moving it back an hour week by week. But you can see how it goes — is your life better? And you can even look at the way that you evaluate your past. When you upheld your responsibilities, did that improve your quality of life? You make sacrifices to make the future better. Well, what if that doesn’t pay off? Well, you know, think about that — you know what that’s like. You endeavor to do something, and it doesn’t work. You’re not appreciated for who you are. You fail — maybe you failed despite your best efforts.
It’s no wonder. It’s harsh that the rewards of life are indiscriminately distributed. It’s hard on everyone. You wake up at three in the morning and torture yourself for your inequities. And you would think: well, I could just shut that off — it’s me after all. We have to strive. There’s something that doesn’t seem fair about that. Why couldn’t we just be happy being who and what we are? Why is it that we’re punished if we don’t strive? I can understand that — like, that was unacceptable. Don’t know if anyone enjoys undeserved reward. You know, we’re getting to the point — it’s something Jung talked about, especially near the end of his life — we’re getting so powerful that each individual is now a force of almost unimaginable destructive power if they so choose to be. That power is going to continue to increase, and what that means is that the degree to which each of us has our act together is going to be something upon which the world increasingly depends for its maintenance.
You need a meaning to sustain you through the vicissitudes of life. So I might insist I’m whoever I think I am at the moment, and if you were polite, you would go along with that. And to some degree, I would be right — we do that when we allow people to save face. That doesn’t alleviate the necessity for me of adopting a role that other people find valuable. It’s like — is life painful? Yes. Is it anxiety provoking? Yes. Is it uncertain? Yes. Is it painful beyond bearing sometimes? Yes. It’s difficult. Everyone agrees about that.
What if you think that’s all pointless? Well, that doesn’t seem very helpful. Okay, so you need a sustaining meaning. Well, where do you find that? You generally find it in responsibility to yourself and other people. And people ask themselves those questions — that’s the answer. Well, what’s meaningful? Well, I have a meaningful relationship with my father. I have a meaningful relationship with my wife. I have a meaningful relationship with my pet — you know, because I take care of that pet.
When I commit to something and make sacrifices, if something’s valuable, you’ll make sacrifices to attain it because we discovered that we could let go of something we value in the present and we would gain something we value even more in the future. We acted that out dramatically in all sorts of strange ways over thousands and thousands of years before it was formalizable psychologically. I can forego gratification in a particular way and benefit in the future. When you act it out in the world, then you get what you want and need. It’s a massive discovery.
You can hear Jordan Peterson’s voice through this video:
