[wateralien]

The adoption of, or adherence to an "identity" is a very western habit. The thought that you or your value derives from a mental construct or external idea.

It's limiting and dangerous. Limiting because you're relying on a relatively small network in the brain, governed almost entirely by your conscious ideas to provide a set of features of who you are. And dangerous because if something else comes up, if you discover something new about yourself, you change, or your circumstances, or the world around you changes and it affects one of your "identities" - that alteration can leave you lost. As the author seems to be saying.

Instead of these quips of, "you need to know who you are", "who are you?", "know yourself" - we should rather be trying, continually, in a never ending process, to discover ourselves.

[sdellis]

Love this take. Clinging to a particular identity is a path to suffering.