Letter to Jake: Life as Experiment
Identity is found, not built
Portrait of the Author as a Young Man
When I was in college, or possibly late in high school, I read a short article in a science magazine about a scientist decades or centuries ago who did experiments on himself. Not like the guy who gave and then cured himself of ulcers to prove they are bacterial, more like the N=1 musings of Slime Mold Time Mold or Buckminster Fuller and his Dymaxion sleep schedule. In fact, I’m pretty sure I remember something about this guy discovering he liked to sleep standing up. (I can’t find the source article, but if you know who I’m talking about, please tell me!)
The approach the scientist took to himself was, well, scientific: he ran experiments, gathered data, and drew conclusions. Through the scientific process he discovered himself and found quirks that no one would ever set out to find - things you only discover with a lot of iteration. He tinkered.
I remember the article sticking in my mind, my thoughts returning to it sporadically for no apparent reason. Why was my subconscious bubbling it back up? What understanding was I constructing?
In parallel, I remember many attempts to construct my identity. As all teens do, I looked for existing identities to copy or take from. My main influence was punk and adjacent cultures (e.g. skateboarding), although I was too chicken to jump in with both feet. I think my vibe was “vaguely alternative”.
The main point here is my framing: construction, not discovery. I thought consciously about a goal and how to reach it. Once I learned about existentialism, I believed strongly that existence precedes essence. I spent a lot of time thinking about how my choices would or would not serve my identity quest.
The results were bad! I was expending a lot of mental energy for no obvious gain, struggling, not psyched about who I was. There were no extremes like self-loathing or deep depression, but something had to change.
The turning point came in my junior year of college. The ultimate frisbee team did a big spring break trip every year. In my sophomore year, I was a secondary or maybe even tertiary player on the social scene, and I wanted that to change. In the runup to junior year spring break, I tried to plan for better but had no confidence in my ideas.
My best idea was my last in this quest to construct identity: don’t. I gave up and decided to let my impulses and feelings take over, ditching my conscious mind.
The result? An excellent spring break, a leap into at least the secondary social scene, and satisfaction. I gave up on planning my identity and never looked back.
Identical Dialectics
The lesson here is not new. “Know thyself” was on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. “Be yourself” is trite advice every teen gets, which the wiseguy rebuts with “I always am.”
The phrase that sticks with me is “Do what is in you.” It’s a rough translation of the Latin facere quod in se est, from Gabriel Biel, scholastic philosopher and teacher to Martin Luther. Biel asserted that God would save those who did their best to be good, even if the good actions had limited scope.
Luther rejected Biel’s phrase and asserted one of his own: sola gratia - “grace alone”. Luther famously believed that good actions reflected an already good soul, they did not create a good soul.1
From the theological thesis and antithesis of Biel and Luther, I create an irreligious synthesis: do what is in you, and you will discover your identity.
Every Man a Scientist
An uncharitable reading of my advice so far would be “just let it rip” - do whatever you want and it’ll all work out. That’s not what I’m saying.
The key change in behavior is observation and reflection. Science works because it iterates, it captures and uses all the information it can. I suspect a scientific approach is foreign for most people, especially in their private lives, but in particular I think the scientific approach is not compatible with having identity goals.
In the language of science, having an identity goal and trying to reach it is like starting with a conclusion and cherrypicking data to back it up. The goal incentivizes you to disregard or forget information about yourself that doesn’t fit.
A personal example: I am not smooth. I don’t have finesse, I’m mediocre at reading people, and my energy is nothing like a James Bond figure. James Bond would not be writing this essay.
Nevertheless, I was definitely guilty of reading pickup artist material in college. (Say what you will about its efficacy, but certainly one goal of their tips is to be smooth.) Unsurprisingly, it was ineffective advice for me because it didn’t fit with my identity. I’m not an incel, so clearly I did get something to work for me. I couldn’t tell you exactly what that something was, but I do know it took an empirical process to find and was based on my particular characteristics.
All Things in Time
Discovery happens on all sorts of timescales. One timescale seems to be an entire life, or at least as much of it as I’ve lived. It goes all the way down to moments and instances. For example, how do you decide what to eat at a restaurant, money and dietary restrictions aside? It’s a process of discovery.
(One of my favorite ways to discover is to pick one thing randomly and detect your reaction. If you pick wrong, you’ll know it instantly and understand your true desire. This is much faster than analyzing your choices and also works when analysis doesn’t really apply.)
Minds need time to work through data. The more data in the problem, the longer the mind needs. Identity is a data-rich problem, so expect your mind to take a long time to crunch it.
Youth and inexperience also contribute to the problem. Young minds are still developing, they miss things. It also takes a lot of negative results before you get a positive one. As a kid, you don’t have a good sense for positive results so you misread negatives. I think this partly explains why most children go through cringey phases.
There’s no substitute for experience. Kids need to be prepared to try a lot of stuff and be lost for a while.
Letter to the Hereditor
Identity is a lifelong puzzle - it has to be - but it’s most pressing growing up. I have a 2.5 year old now, Jake. I feel my duty is to accelerate and put guardrails on Jake’s discovery process. I don’t need him to be well rounded. If he doesn’t like math I’ll be sad but I’ll accept it. He has no obligation to play ultimate like me. But he needs to try, ultimate and the other things, for his own sake. My job is to help him try every day.
Similarly, many of the Founding Fathers liked to gamble as a way to test their luck - to see if fortune favored them. As David Fischer notes in Albion’s Seed, the Virginia colonists “made bets not merely on horses, cards, cockfights, and backgammon, but also on crops, prices, women, and the weather.” I recommend the book, but if you don’t have time, read the Slate Star Codex review.