identity-past

identity-past

tags :: R:time

  • The Casey Neistat New Year 2020 video brings up interesting points on the fact that at some point in our lives, we shift from defining our identities based on our ambitions, aspirations etc to basing it on our past experiences, traumas and such.

  • He mostly attributes this to the simple accumulation of experiences that pushes us to look backwards

  • I’m not entirely sure that’s true

  • I distinctly remember having to cultivate the habit of looking at my own past around the time I applied to grad school

    • There was this exercise of digging into my past, and weaving experiences into a story and then sincerely presenting that story to a person in an effort to convince them to accept you (in this case, into grad school)
    • Since then, I’ve been very prolific at weaving narratives aroun my own pasts and repeating these stories to myself
    • At this point, I wonder if I’ve gone too far. I’ve hit a point where I’m trapped in this process of leaning on my past to define my identity. In many ways, this makes me feel “old” despite being pretty young. I’ve had a ton of people in mid-30s/early 40s point this out to me.
    • I also feel very trapped in the identity that is “implied” by my past experiences, giving me no room to transform the way I have in the last 10-15 years. And this inability to see a future, even an imaginary one, directly hurts my ability to move on.

  • I wonder how much of this is an inherenet human condition, and how much is insinuated by the Western narrative-obsessed culture. It might be easier to navigate if we stopped using cultural tropes as glue to tie our fragmented bits of past into a coherent story.

  • In a way, buying into western narrative-focus on pasts to inform our identities is like buying into a bad editing software to make your movie - you quickly run out of features and end up with a clunky lofi facsimile of what you intended to make.

  • The ever widening difference between the actual effects our past and the one filtered throught the narrative-sieve is capable of creating its own kind of cognitive dissonance. I wonder how many of us live with that burden. I certainly do