I have on occasion been asked to help people find their identity. It is assumed that I know what identity is because I consult with business people. I have written about right livelihood which presupposes identity. Right livelihood is the productive action that follows from understanding one’s identity and talents.
When we are with friends we generally know who the friends are as people. We know their identity. In many cases we may not be willing to say what we know out loud; as is the case for a friend of mine who is weak, indecisive, lost and sucks the energy of other people. That is actually identity. This friend is also generous, kind and loyal; a subset of identity. But this person means occupation and social status when they use the word identity. Both are flimsy alternatives to their real identity.
Many people associate identity with personal goals, drives, passions and lifestyle. Which anyone may or may not have, regardless of identity. Loving animals and caring about them is not identity.
I’ve never been able to help other people find, describe or recognize their identity. Maybe I’m too polite. Without a self-understood identity, most people can be perfectly functional, and most people are.
This is an era where a vast swath of people don’t know their identity and they choose to use race, gender, ethnicity or politics as their identity. That is usually a source of unhappiness. We are certainly in an unhappy era with the woke population.
Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton don't know their identity but Elon Musk and Donald Trump do.
Knowing one’s identity helps one move through the world, comfortably.
One of the most visible outward signs of the national loss of identity are the Industry codes and the occupation codes published by the U.S. government. Today’s list of industry codes numbers four digits, up to 10,000 industries. The occupation codes are six digits, up to 1,000,000. Which really means there are few if any meaningful occupational categories.
When these codes were first developed in the 1930s, there were only one thousand industries and ten thousand occupations.
Before that most occupations were known to ordinary people. Farmer, minister, mechanic, laborer, manager, dentist, et cetera. When I was in the Army in 1960 I could find my occupational code. By 1970 there was no such code for me.
In this way, modern commerce has created a very fluid world of work and simultaneously created a wasteland of identities.
Identity, real identity is now more important for a stable, comfortable person and much harder than ever to determine.
While I don’t consider my advice very helpful, start by asking a close friend to give you some useful descriptors of the kind I used above. Use character attributes, not personality qualities. Use strong-weak, confident-lost, curious-incurious, determined-lazy and similar attributes. Knowing one’s identity makes life more comfortable.
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My son read this blog and said I needed to write more.
Identity is expressed by posture and life choices. Humans can read posture, but can seldom describe how to interpret it. Horses, dogs and many other animals can read posture, too. They always know an alpha male. Humans can too but we can seldom verbalize our observations.
Life choices also define identity. My son mentioned a work of fiction that looked at alternative lives that a person might have lived had important choices been different. It was fiction. Life choices we make are integral to our identity. I know a young girl who became a vegetarian at age five. It is increasingly obvious, as she is now a teenager, that that was an important part of her identity. For myself, I can see that my identity was reified throughout my life as I made major decision after decision. By my mid 20s, my identity was well established both for me to recognize and for those around me to observe.