I have an acquaintance who is a Spanish teacher. Whenever any topic of conversation turns to anything remotely related to the Spanish language or Spanish culture, he invariably interjects his opinion and will offer some sort of commentary or explanation. He speaks with a sense of authority. He’s a Spanish teacher. That’s who he is.
A few years ago, at a dinner party, the topic of conversation turned to the city of Barcelona. Someone mentioned they were going to Barcelona and he offered a few comments about the city and its inhabitants. He had spent three days there a few years previously.
Many years ago, I lived in Barcelona. Once for a semester in college and again after I graduated for two years. I took umbrage to his comments and tried to politely express why someone might take another perspective on things. He, without hesitation, shut me down, and told me, in front of the group, that I was just wrong and had no idea what I was talking about.
It was a curiously heated exchange for a dinner party. He was clearly annoyed that I had contradicted his opinion about something related to Spanish culture.
I was clearly annoyed that he was making blunderbuss statements about a city and its people, of which he knew only very little. (Or, less charitably to my sense of identity, I was annoyed that he was trying to claim that he knew more about Barcelona and Catalunya than I did, when I had lived there, and he had only visited.)
This is an example of an identity clash. It was a moment when my sense of identity publicly conflicted with someone else’s sense of identity. It was a casual dinner party, but to this day, I don’t really care for this person, and I’m certain he doesn’t care for me.
Even just writing down this anecdote, I find myself getting a little worked up. Just thinking about it gets some adrenaline flowing.
Now, why on earth why I get worked up about something so stupid? Why would I care what this person whom I see maybe once a year thinks about Barcelona? I haven’t lived in Barcelona in 15 years. He never lived there. Nothing about this conversation impacted my health, my livelihood, or my daily life, even in the most minuscule way. But clearly I cared. Clearly I still do care.
Why?
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Often, when we’re upset, it’s because our sense of identity crashes with reality, or clashes with someone else’s identity, in a way we don’t like.
This is an underappreciated fact of human reality. By the time we reach high school, we construct a certain narrative around our sense of “self.” This is who I am. This is what I do. This is what I like. This is what I know. This is more or less fixed, with some additions and subtractions. Occasionally, major changes happen. Someone finds religion. Someone abandons a religion. But for the most part, if you know someone at age 18, you have a pretty good sense of what they’re going to be like at age 50.
Identity can be constructed around anything, from one’s job (I’m a Spanish teacher), to what one knows (I’m an expert on Catalunya), to what one likes (I’m a runner), to where we live (Salida is the most beautiful place on earth!), to what we wear (Prana or Prada?), to what we don’t like (I can’t stand Trump), to what we eat (I’m a vegetarian), and so on. Each of us picks a few things that matter to us, and we filter our reality through this sense of identity.
Identity gives us a shortcut to make friends and to form groups. A lot of my friends are runners. Many of my friends meditate. When I was in high school and in college, I chose my friends in large part based on what music they liked.
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From an evolutionary perspective, narrative construction and a sense of identity has a fairly easy explanation. The biggest threat to our survival and the survival of our genes is other people. We form a sense of identity to help us explain and justify our value to our social group. A strong person in a strong tribe has a good chance of survival. A weak person or a person without a tribe has almost no chance of survival.
We all have a deep, evolutionary need to play an important role. An essential role. To be a part of something bigger than ourselves.
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But like many vestiges of our evolutionary past, this deep craving for a sense of identity is easily manipulated for profit and not necessarily as useful as it once was.
Let me give you an example.
I’m a fan of the Denver Nuggets basketball team. The Denver Nuggets basketball team has a star player who is from Serbia. The other leading players are from Canada, Michigan, South Carolina, Spain, and Louisiana. The coach is from New York. The owner is the billionaire grandson of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. He is from Missouri.
I don’t even live in Denver anymore. But somehow, for some reason, I still hold on to the notion that this collection of talented and highly compensated people from all over the world still represents me. My sense of identity is tied up in the Denver Nuggets.
It’s a complete and total fiction.
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Our lives are built around such fictions. The politicians we vote for. The teams we cheer for. The clothes we wear. We like to think that these things represent us, and we are connected with them in some deep way. But they’re not. People exploit our sense of identity in an attempt to raise their own status or to acquire wealth.
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This may sound like a strange thing to say, but your identity isn’t you. Your identity is a set of concepts and a narrative structure you tell yourself to try to make sense of reality. It’s mostly a work of fiction. Life just is. Reality just is.
Identity is a post-hoc narrative structure we create to make sense of it all, so that we have some people to hang out with and we feel a sense of importance and belonging. But for the most part, it has little or no nexus with reality.
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Some of the pine forests around me are dying. It’s a result of the pine beetle carrying a fungus that kills the trees. It’s happening as a result of global warming, most likely. The winters aren’t as cold as they used to be here, and that means the beetle population is much higher, which means the fungus is spreading much faster than it ever has.
Around me, there are thousands of acres of beetle kill, in remote and hard-to-get to locations, often on the sides of mountains, and there’s basically no way to deal with it, other than to wait for a lightning strike or a campfire that causes a forest fire that burns the whole area down.
All of this is making the area around my home just a little less idyllic and beautiful. Once the big fire comes, it will probably make things, at least in the short term, a lot less idyllic and beautiful.
Driving up Monarch Pass near my home, I take this beetle-kill problem very personally. My sense of identity, of a person who has chosen to live in a wild, scenic, and beautiful place, is crashing into reality, which is that nature and global warming are doing their thing, and that thing is probably going to make my world less wild, scenic, and beautiful over the next 10 to 20 years.
It’s still very wild, beautiful, and remote. But there’s a very real blight there. It doesn’t really affect my health, my life, or my livelihood in any way. But it bothers me, because I now personally identify with those forests in a way that I do not with the tundras of Greenland or Siberia that are also affected by global warming. It’s as if global warming has started to create a blight on me personally, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
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Listen carefully when you hear people talk about their neighborhood and their homes. Almost invariably, the tone of their speech will get a little quicker. They’ll get defensive. They will offer some sort of explanation of why their corner of the universe is better than all other corners of the universe. We feel a need to justify where we live, what we do, and why.
Admitting anything to the contrary is an admission of a flawed or inconsistent identify. And our consciousness is designed, first and foremost, to provide a consistent narrative about who we are, what we do, and why.
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Life is always changing, in ways we might like and in some ways we might not. I’m getting older; I’m getting wrinkles. My hair is turning gray, on my temples and in my beard. It’s getting harder every year to run and to stay healthy. The type of writing and entertainment that sells, the type of writing that people want to read, is getting farther removed from the type of writing that I produce and that I care about. The beautiful forests are dying around me. All of these things are happening, regardless of how I feel about them.
Reality just is. It doesn’t care whether it comports to our sense of identity.
This is neither good nor bad. But we decide that something is good or bad when we have some sort of hope or expectation for our identity and reality, and our hopes and expectations are out of whack with reality.
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In my own life, more often than ever before, I’m trying to let go of the moments when I find myself having a strong sense of identity. It doesn’t do me any good to get into a pissing contest with someone about who knows the most about Catalunya, or distance running, or whatever else I’m identifying with in the moment.
There will be many moments in our lives when we’ll find our sense of identity at odds with the world around us. In those moments, we can choose to try to impose our sense of identity on the world, or we can get angry or frustrated at reality for not comporting to our expectations. Or we can just try to experience reality as it is, without judgment or frustration.
There is no right or simple answer, I think, about what to do with our sense of identity in every situation. But perhaps there is some use in noticing when our sense of identity gets in the way of our experience of reality. To observing what we identify with and why. And which of those parts of our identity, in the end, we want to allow to consume our experience.