Keeping your identity small
Paul Graham once wrote that you should keep your identity small. His point was pragmatic: the smaller your identity, the less you’ll get dragged into pointless fights. But I think there’s a deeper truth hidden in there, because the real problem is that the question “Who am I?” is never answered directly. It always folds into “Who am I to others?” Identity is always staged.
Think of that party game where everyone sticks a word to their forehead and has to guess who they are from everyone else’s reactions. That’s what identity feels like most of the time, you only glimpse yourself in the mirror of other people. Kierkegaard called this the burden of anxiety and the dizziness of freedom. You could be anything, and so you don’t know what you are. Slavoj Žižek sharpens the point by stating that your identity is a signifier, a role performed for others so that you can retroactively believe it yourself.
Our culture has found a shortcut, or more like a cheat code, to get around this pesky anxiety. Instead of deciding who you want to be, you can buy your way into an identity. Lifestyle becomes a kind of prosthetic self. Don’t know who you are? Don’t worry, there’s a lifestyle for that. Just pick a car, a watch, a diet, a yoga class. Post a thirst trap pic to your Instagram and you’ve clocked it.
Your identity becomes a shopping cart, and it works for a while. You convince others, and by extension yourself, that you are happy, successful, even ageless. But it’s a hollow loop. The moment one signal loses its shine, you need a new one. Your identity becomes too big and too fragile, too dependent on constant maintenance and up keep. It’s like how it’s hard to tell where Captain Jack Sparrow ends and Johnny Depp begins. Johnny’s played the game so long with the paper on his forehead he’s forgotten is isn’t a fictional pirate. And we fall into the same trap getting stuck in an endless loop of proving who we are, rather than being who we are.
It’s not just about consumer signals. So much of ideology, whether political or otherwise, is actually personal identity. I am a leftist. I am a conservative. I am a Christian nationalist. I am an independent freethinker. These labels sound like positions on the world, but they’re really positions on the self. They’re less about engaging with reality as it is, and more about curating reality in a way that reaffirms who we think we are or who we want to be seen as. That’s why when someone is too wrapped up in their identity, you can’t really have a grounded conversation with them. You’re not talking about reality anymore, you’re talking to the maintenance crew of their self-image.
Now, a lot of self-help advice will say just stop caring what people think. But that misses the point because you can’t. You’ve already internalised the gaze of others. Even when you’re alone, you’re anticipating how you’ll look or sound to others. That’s the human condition.
Freedom doesn’t come from denying that fact, but from mastering it. The trick isn’t to escape the gaze, but to get better at dancing with it. To stop letting lifestyle and consumption write the script for you, and instead choose something worth embodying. Choosing what dream, what project, what fidelity will shape the way you appear, rather than letting lifestyle do it for you.
This is where Graham’s “small identity” starts to sound less like productivity advice and more like philosophy. Žižek warns against over-identification, because it traps you in someone else’s game. To keep your identity small is to refuse the totalising labels from political tribes to religious sects or brand affiliations that demand complete allegiance.
So here’s what I’ve learned, a small identity isn’t a shallow one. It’s lighter. Freer. You don’t need to announce who you are every second of the day. You also don’t need to keep trying to “find” your identity by endlessly chasing the next thing that feels more like “you”, whether that’s a job, a group of friends, or a relationship.
You just need something that gives you license to live with generosity, humour, and joy.
Your identity should be just big enough to animate your life and no bigger.