Identities

Your ego wants to have identities. Without identities it feels naked and it starts freaking out like a scared little child. Your ego needs a mask. Masks are the identities. They are what makes your ego feel ok and secure. They are who you believe you are. All these identities your ego puts on lie in the personal unconscious.

  • Race
  • Religion
  • Gender
  • Sexuality
  • Jobs
  • Income
  • Status
  • Education
  • Entertainment

Your identities have emotional attachments to them (kind of like a tattoo).

  • Identity of a Relationship (status) - Attachment to your partner
  • Identity of a Parent (status) - Attachment to your child
  • Identity of a Teacher (job) - Attachment to your students

Based on that emotional attachment you have you're going to believe in a concept and act on that concept.

  • Attachment to your partner - Concept of dating
  • Attachment to your child - Concept of parenting
  • Attachment to your students - Concept of teaching

And based on those concepts you're going to play an archetype. Archetypes come from the collective unconscious. They're generalizations for humans going back to our primial monkey days. No matter which culture you go to we all generally have the same archetypes.

  • Good
  • Bad
  • Winner
  • Loser
  • Leader
  • Ruler
  • Hero
  • Villain
  • Mentor
  • Popular
  • Loner

*The Mad Scientist Archetype played by different characters in Steins; Gate, Full Metal Alchemist, and Dragon Ball.

There are millions of different archetypes out there. It can be challenging in listing archetypes because multiple archetypes can come together to form a single archetype. In any regard, archetypes can be good role models or bad role models for your identity to play. You can choose anyone you want and gain new ways of acting. But don't let your entire personality become one archetype. You need a varied diet in your personality. Most personalities are quite complicated and can't be generalized to one archetype or another. We all play multiple archetypes and it's always changing.

A mask will come out of the personal unconscious and the ego will put it on and play a character. The wearing of a mask is called the persona. The actual character you're playing is based on the archetype. Our identifications, attachments, and concepts bring us all that subjective and objective value that we are craving for. There are a lot of different identities, attachments, and concepts that we all play.

People come to know us through our artifically created identity. It's how we understand each other. When you don't have a persona at all you can not function well socially. Social masks are what people get to know you for. Next time you watch a show notice how the characters socialize with each other. Each character usually has a specific persona tied to them, and entire conversations are had not necessarily just on the topic but also based on the personas the characters are playing. If you're struggling socially, it's probably because you don't have a well-defined persona or identity. Sometimes it can be really hard to teach yourself that the identities or masks you're playing really matter at all. For a while I felt like all these conversations and social games I was playing with people were really just useless at the end of the day. Nobody is really anything. None of this really matters. We're all just playing a social game to forget about the void. To not feel lonely. And even though you may realize that you're not really your masks or your ego you still need boundaries. You still need social masks to at least have an interface with reality.

Problems can arise if you overly identify with your persona. It happens to many young people on social media a lot. Many people present themselves to be a certain fixed identity and they don't want to be anything that contradicts what that is. They can try real hard to come off a certain way to people and if they are ever seen in a different way then that is going to make their ego very very uncomfortable. The persona is not the self or the ego instead the persona is like the mask over your ego. It's not uniform and it's constantly changing. This is why you can have multiple different identities and behave differently depending on who you're around. There are more things you identify with than you show to the world. Those are all the little flaws we all have that we don't want to talk about because it makes us vulnerable. Sometimes personas can get in the way of that.

Because we get social approval for all these social masks we put on it can be very hard to show people what we actually are or what we actually believe in and value, because we repress what we actually are we think we're our social masks. But you're not your identity.

The biggest problem people seem to think is that they think they're their ego. They're not. You have many egocentric biases that try to trick you into thinking you are.

I dislike the word "You" in English. It's probably just as bad as the word "Is", but nevertheless I am forced to use it. The reason why I dislike "You" is because if you think about it, it really doesn't make sense in the way we use it.

"You're this, You're that, You're this, You're that, You're this, You're that!"

It can be very positive or very negative, but the mistake you're going to make is you're going to think you're your ego.

And, of course, any criticism of the belief or the mask is an attack on the person itself. We conflate our masks with ourselves.

We like to think by having certain masks or identities will make our ego feel more complete.

  • "If I have this relationship!"
  • "If I have this social media!"
  • "If I have these friends!"
  • "If I have this amount of money!"
  • "If I have this job!"

Other identifications, attachments, and concepts can fight with each other to make sure your ego feels ok. Since your "I" identifies with a thought, that thought turns it into an identity. If you try to stop identifying with a thought you will only keep identifying with it. The harder you try to repress a thought the more you struggle. Like quicksand. If you repress your ego and you try to deny it the ability to have an identity well that is like trying to pretend the quick sand isn't there. The only thing you can do is observe your thoughts, see them for what they truly are, accept them, and slowly identify with other thoughts.

You're not your identity. You identify with things, but you're really not any of those things. It can be hard to wrap your head around this and the ego is going to quickly make sure you forget that.

Instead of thinking "You're this" or "You're that" instead this "You're playing this character" or "You're playing that character." But what happens when "this" or "that" goes away? The identity you played?

The ego is very judgemental. Your brain is built with millions of different implicit biases, ready to take hold and strike at its hearts content. You don't notice the million quick snap judgments your brain is making about people every second. All these stereotypes, generalizations, and biases. These are most likely not true, but we often assume they are. Your brain will not care. It will happily make those emotional biases it if has to survive. And you can't suppress these judgements either. The harder you try, the more they will appear. It will oversimplify people (who are really complex in general) with basic simple labels. Basic simple identifications. I hate it when my brain does this because I know people are complicated and complex. I know there are so many things under the surface than a simple bullshit label. And I feel terrible when I do it.

It's time to take those masks off and realize that the persona and the identity is just something you created. You made it up. It's something that we all just made up. But it can be fun to play with, for at least, a little while.