When you think about answering the question "who am I?" what factors do you consider? Are we just our experiences or interests, our beliefs, our demography? Who is the golem that drives your body-machine?
The self is a narrative that we tell about ourselves, to ourselves. That is all.
formative traumas, drugs, the dead generations weighing like a nightmare on living brain
dead generations weighing like a nightmare on living brain
i take my answer back its this :specter:
i have no clue how to answer this without sounding nihilistic, pretentious, or both
ok, I'll try. I don't feel like I'm anything beyond a bubble on the surface of this immediate moment in history and eventually I'll die and my organs will resume being part of the global biomass. I don't have any free will whatsoever and am only the result of every previous moment taken before I was even born. I have an illusion of consciousness which is simultaneously a blessing and an incredibly painful curse.
I as an individual don't exist in any meaningful capacity beyond a very brief spark of individual novelty that is near instantaneously reabsorbed into the machinations of the wider universe
I tried in the other reply and it sounds worse than in my head
Mostly, I don't think about "who I am". I'm more concerned with "what I'm doing now".
When you ask most people who they are, they will tell you their job, their relationship status, and maybe what their main fandom is.
I have changed so much in life, and I know that life changes at the drop of a hat, so I focus on the immediate experience as best as I can. My motivation to keep going forward is to make it easier to do the things I enjoy doing. There have been a few constants in life. I have always enjoyed music in it's many forms, I enjoy nature, and I enjoy the company of a life partner. That is why I got married, moved to the woods and collected a bunch of records and instruments.
The new thing in my life is stability, and the ability to plant my roots somewhere and just focus on that.
I used to bounce around from relationship to relationship, living situation to living situation, and concert to concert. I got tired of living on thin margins like that, so I made a change.
I would surprise 20 year old me with "now" me. He wouldn't have thought people could change that much.
David Graeber indirectly makes an argument in the book Debt: The First 5000 Years (which I'm reading now and it's great! You all should too). He observed that in cultures across the world slaves were often made from victims of war or taken from far off lands. These people had their support networks, lives, cultures, and all the people places meaningful to them stripped away to be made a slave. Graeber implies that it's these relations that make us who we are - our social being as defined by the people we are in community with. Ultimately everything we are is a social phenomenon: Mother, daughter, father, son, sister, brother, teacher, student, so on and so forth. What makes us "us" is our UNIQUE relations to other people. Our role is irreplaceable to those who's lives we are entangled with.
I think you could extend this metaphysically in a rational way too - but it was an interesting conception that's fresh on my mind.
Maybe this question is fundamentally rooted in an individualistic Westernized/Enlightenment frame. Maybe people don't even ask this kind of question outside of that frame. Maybe it doesn't even matter.
But if it doesn't matter, why is it bringing me such agony?
I know, when you strip away all my idiosyncrasies, kinks, sardonicism, and window dressings:
I am a dad.
I would like very much to define myself outside of that...but everything else is secondary.
"Hi nice to meet you. Tell me about yourself."
"I am brain chemicals."
