Say I asked you to tell me your name. I am fairly confident that you would be able to do so accurately. If you were to say that your name is “David”, then your Driver’s License probably has “David” printed on it, along with whatever your last name is. If I were to ask you ‘David, how old are you?’ and then you said ‘I am 23 years old,’ I am also fairly confident that if I were to look at your ID I would see a date next to the DOB label that is roughly 23 years before today. Now what if I asked you where you live? If you were to reply with ‘I live at 123 Bakersfield Lane’ and then I went to 123 Bakersfield Lane, I would bet that if I asked your neighbors who lived at that address, they would say ‘David lives there! Did you know that he is 23 years old?’
Great! Now let’s do some more. What if I asked you ‘David, what is your purpose in life?’ Would you be able to answer that question with the same certainty as you did the question about your name? What if I said to you: ‘How well do you understand what motivates you to live your life the way that you do?’ How succinctly could you tell me about that? Is it money? Or pride? Or some kind of altruism? And if I asked you about your flaws, would you be able to expertly identify them, as well as how they have developed throughout your life?
How would you relate these two sets of questions? True, both of these sets of questions are about you, but to say that feels disingenuous. Both are about you, in that they are in reference to the same person, but they are about different parts of you. The answers you would give to each set of inquiries highlight different attributes of yourself, with varying degrees of how innate those qualities are. Another way of looking at it is that they pinpoint different aspects of what we think identity is.
The first couple of questions I asked talk about identity on what I believe to be a more surface level. Things like our name and address are not the parts of ourselves that really define us, I would say. They can be changed relatively easily and really only serve transactional purposes. Knowing an individual’s name does not tell you much about the tenets by which they live their lives. That is more of what the second set of questions go after. Those are the ones that talk about more core aspects of your being, characteristics that have a large impact on the way we live our lives. They still talk about you, but you in a deeper sense. And the argument that I would make is that deeper level of our identity is the most significant factor in the way our life goes.
Choices
I put so much importance on this layer of our being because its reach in our lives is so wide. It determines a great deal about our behavior through its affect on our beliefs and what we put value in. What we value is what we are going to pursue. Opportunity costs are real, so every decision has a price, a material effect on who we are as people. As we get older we are going to make more and more choices directed towards whatever it is that we deem important — be it wealth or notoriety or something else. Whether we realize it or not, we will be structuring our lives around these priorities, and it is these priorities that are going to give our life its own distinct shape.
If what we are chasing is money (and I use money again as an example because it is one of the easiest to understand) then that is going to play a significant role in determining the type of education that we receive, the people we connect with, the hobbies we entertain, and the places we choose to live. And these are all factors that will both subtly and not so subtly affect the way our life looks. So these parts of ourselves should be understood well, so we are not driving blind, in a sense.
Transparency
However, that is easier said than done. These types of questions are very difficult to answer. They were difficult to even type! It is worth our time, though, to inspect why questions that address core parts of ourselves are met with a certain type of reluctance. It is possible that you felt a level of uneasiness when you read the intro to this piece. I probably would, too, if I came across something similar without expecting it. But again, why do we feel this way?
Turning our eyes inwards requires us to be honest with ourselves. We no longer have this facade that we put up so frequently when interacting with the outside world. We can no longer tell lies and make up stories about our personalities. We are agreeing to look at ourselves as we are, not as we think we are. And a part of that is coming face to face to with our own flaws. Who wants to do that? Most of us have a pretty positive view of our own personalities, and we would like to keep it that way. But in the course of maintaining that perspective, we fail — either knowingly or unknowingly — to take an honest accounting of our flaws as well.
I focus on our flaws being the obstacle to self-understanding not as a way to say that we are completely flawed. Not at all. We all have plenty of good qualities whether we realize it or not. It’s just that the parts of yourself that you really like, like your generosity or your warm attitude to your family, are probably not the parts that you avoid thinking about when thinking yourself.
To that feeling of reluctance we experience when we come face to face with ourselves, I say this: you could argue that the human condition is all about being flawed. It is all about making mistakes, recognizing them, and then doing our best to not make them anymore in the future. I am not perfect, and neither are you, but that is not the point. The point is that both you and I are committed to being better today than we were yesterday. And having an accurate view of ourselves is how we do that effectively. We need to know where we stand and how to improve from there, so that is why self-reflection is so important on our journey of growth.