Ink to Blog

Becoming a blueprint

As a teenager, I searched for an identity and found it with music, inside gaming subcultures and the things I consumed. I could assign a role to myself and people would recognize me as someone from that group. It defined me through my clothing, the things I talked about and my social media presence. It was an easy way to find a place in the world at a time when my self-identity was not yet carved in stone, and still forming.

Persons and puzzles

As adults, we still carry such labels with us. It is cognitively easier to assign someone a role with all the attributes that come with it according to our definition of that role. We have an easier time making sense of a person when they fit into a well-defined category, even if in reality they do not possess many of these attributes.

Merging with a role

I want to live up to a certain role. But only if I think that the role carries positive or neutral annotations with it. It is still something that shapes my identity, but unlike when I was younger, I am not able to shift in and out of roles that easily. There is less experimentation to determine which role is fitting or what role I want to be in. And once someone has assigned such a role to me, it is much harder to convince the person otherwise.

To not shatter the conception of a role the other person has in their mind, we tend to merge into that role to do it justice. Challenging that role means introducing friction in a social setting. Because it is part of our identity, we want the other person to see us as a part of that group. We confirm the label again and again, and because we want to be a good representative of the group, we also attain traits that we normally wouldn't. The danger lies in becoming more of a blueprint of a member of a group, rather than an individual.

"A person from that group would do X. So I should do X."

We can only break out of this pattern if we don't shape our identity around being part of a group, and instead try to stand on our own. Even if we strip all our hobbies and group memberships away, there should still be a person who is sure of who they are.