Legend has it that when a wanderer asks the Buddha if there is such a thing as the self, the Buddha offers silence, which some interpret as caution against questions like, “What am I?” and “Do I exist?” because they beget conclusions like “I have a self” or “I have no self,” and both thoughts get in the way of awakening. Perhaps the first wisdom in the search for self is to abandon quest. But despite all the wisdom in the world, the search for self continues. 

The protagonist in Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? longs to ‘build her soul’. She muses, “You can admire anyone for being themselves. It’s hard not to, when everyone’s so good at it. But when you think of them all together like that, how can you choose?” Heti describes the characters in her book as “the generation that doesn’t reach the promised land”. They seemingly search without finding. Perhaps the second wisdom in the search for self is to hold the possibility of no arrival.

If you believe as Emerson, that “to be yourself…is the greatest accomplishment,” or as James Baldwin, that “one has to look after oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality…which is absolutely unique in the world,” then being yourself matters. But, who’s to say the self isn’t, as David Hume claimed, a bundle of perceptions in perpetual rapid movement, with no apparent unity? In which case, the self may not exist as the coherent and knowable thing we imagine it to be, and identity may only be a story we repeat to ourselves.

Psychologists have argued that this story is not inconsequential, that the feeling of knowing yourself is important even if it is based on faulty assumptions. As the self changes (over time, with context, etc.) what remains more or less constant is the function of the self. Our self concepts are tools for “understanding how people live in the world, make choices, and make meaning of their experiences”.

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A line of thinking I find compelling views personality as the friction generated by a self navigating its environment. An adaptation. A mask. A translation.

The idea of a hidden, deeper, or real self (and therefore a surface or false self) is common: in religion, the soul is wrapped in flesh and ego; there is the conscious and unconscious for Freud & friends; the perceived, inner, and essential self in astrology; and so on. Differently fields converge on viewing the self as a multidimensional and layered thing, diverging only in the nature, primacy, and potency of these dimensions. 

Multiplicity is the name of the game. We tend to define ourselves across many dimensions like our social roles, bodies, inner thoughts, outer perceptions, and perhaps even our favorite teams or television shows. There are enough dimensions and dictates (familial, cultural, legal, religious, etc.) that it should be possible to exist within guidelines such as “a person should be kind…should observe the Sabbath…should wear a seat belt…” without ever wondering how to build your soul. It should be possible to pass the full length of your life under the cooling shade of institutions, inflating and mistaking their solidity for your own. 

It may have been possible in ‘pre-modern cultures’ to sustain your identity through the group with whom you shared “a sequence of established rites, rituals, ceremonies, and other cultural experiences”, among whom you were born, and among whom you expected to die. Today, we are less likely to live and die in one place or among an unchanged social unit. We interact with and are more weakly tethered to more groups and, consequently, to competing moralities and world views.

American psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs posit that “a lack of ties to extended family and local community, and the high degree of mobility of modern lives, means that people not only have to establish their identities but they may also have to do so over and over again with each new setting.” And this responsibility largely rests on the individual.

And yet, despite weakening social ties, “people do not create themselves from air; rather, what is possible, what is important, what needs to be explained all come from social context—from what matters to others.” The ideals we hold for ourselves, from what hairstyle we wear to what goals are worth striving for, are largely a product of the here and now. Even the desire to “be yourself” is probably informed by our current understanding of the self and how we value the quality or appearance of authenticity. Another person elsewhere might scoff at the idea of being yourself, wondering how it is possible to be anything else.

Most of us have a vague sense of what the minimum conditions and maximum realization of selfhood are. For some, the capacity to think of yourself as both subject and object as in, “I am thinking of myself” is all it takes to qualify a self. So when Heti asks, “How should a person be?” or when someone feels like they have no self, what they might really mean is, “I do not like this self and I wish to become another.” At which point, the executive function—the aspect of the self that initiates behaviors and makes selections—would perform its evolutionary function of aligning us with our our idealized selves.

We seek alignment not only internally but also in our environment. The misalignment between ourselves and our worlds destabilizes us. Social upheaval for instance tends to coincide with increased interest in astrology which, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Enneagram, and the Big Five and other personality tests, functions as a tool for rediscovering and reconstituting the self. In her inquiry into astrology’s renewed popularity among American millennials, Julie Beck concluded that part of astrology’s appeal is that “it can be a relief, in a time of division, not to have to choose.”

The way I see it, the problem with personality tests isn’t so much that they are, as Merve Emre (“The Personality Brokers”) puts it, “among the silliest, shallowest products of late capitalism” or that they betray a certain kind of narcissism but that personality tests can be used to support the notion of an essential self waiting to be discovered and, in so doing, rob us of perhaps the only thing that is fundamentally ours—our capacity to imagine and create ourselves.  

It’s easy to see why we avoid choosing. Psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper found that when faced with too many options, we are less likely to choose and less likely to be satisfied with the choice we make. So, back to square one, “How can you choose?”

Viewing becoming as an event that rests on a single or a few definitive choices introduces the possibility of failure and existential overwhelm. After all, it isn’t really choosing we are afraid of, it is choosing wrong, and more than that, choosing wrong without the opportunity to redeem ourselves. There is relief in viewing becoming as a process, in noticing that we become who we are through an almost infinite number of choices. This perspective allows for the possibility of course correction, for growth, and for the understanding that identity is not a fixed point but a journey we navigate one choice at a time. Perhaps the third wisdom in the search for self is to remember that the self can be made, unmade, and continuously remade.