TIRED OF MYSELF

The "know thyself" maxim is a heavy burden that accompanies us and prevents us from freeing ourselves from what we are, because it takes for granted that we are something that can be known and grouped into a fixed identity. In his discussion with Heidegger, the philosopher Levinas argued that true freedom is escaping from oneself.

Identity confines you, limits you, but above all it conditions you, potentially reaching the extreme of repression. Unconsciously assimilating an identity means adopting a way of behaving, thinking, feeling, and seeing life that leaves no room for other "ways of being."

From this perspective, being free is not about knowing yourself and taking control, but quite the opposite—discovering yourself and re-cognizing yourself. Self-knowledge shouldn't be the ultimate goal of life, but rather the starting point. It involves breaking the patterns of an identity you've assumed, imported, assimilated, and that has unconsciously conditioned your thinking, actions, emotions... sometimes even against your own personality.

Reflection on the questions that shape us should be a habit cultivated from an early age. We'd like to be brave, patient, or loving, but these processes are only achieved through action (not desire, not reflection). It's not a matter of saying "God, grant me patience," or waiting for courage to arrive so we can make a decision—it's about recognizing the situations life puts before us so we can be patient, brave, or loving. Sometimes, building identity is simply a matter of paying attention.

The all-pervading turbo-temporality, laziness, complacency, and millions of tempting stimuli don't favor real-time analysis of situations. Daily attention will reveal moments to practice patience, place us in scenarios requiring courage, and offer situations where we have the chance to be affectionate...

Being loving, brave, or patient is not a goal to achieve—it's an action to perform. We must know how to interpret contexts and pay attention to each opportunity that presents itself.

This means conducting an analysis that starts from the real, the concrete, and moves toward identity—not the other way around. Every day we're affectionate with our child when they wake up, with our pet, with the friend who calls us worried... The sum of these concrete, specific, real actions is what constitutes the generic "being loving." But if we do it in reverse, we'll most likely fail, because that generic notion carries universal formulas configured outside our reality, forcing us to act in a certain way with a high probability of doing violence to ourselves.

The consequence of following these prefabricated directives around a particular identity is the "standardization of our personality." Perhaps what's happening to us is that we've become too uniform and, upon realizing it, we're overwhelmed by the existential anguish of knowing we're ordinary. The philosopher Baudrillard put it this way: It is culture that clones us, and mental cloning anticipates any biological cloning...

Through educational systems, mass media, culture, and mass information, singular beings become identical copies of others. We are experiencing an excess of identity. The complication arises when this excess intensifies, generating anxiety and, in the worst cases, depression. One of the most accurate definitions of depression was offered by Alain Ehrenberg when he claimed that depression was "the fatigue of being oneself." We perceive that there is too much reality (hyperreality) and we want to embrace it all the time and at all costs.

The exuberance of information (hyperinformation) means that every time we make a decision, we're aware that we're abandoning many others we would have liked to pursue. As if we didn't have enough pressure, we also bear an excess of zeal for building a personality that distinguishes us from the rest, suffering from hyperidentity. We face an excessive reality, and our knowledge about it is excessive too. There's too much of everything—too many trips to take, too many experiences to live, too many foods to try, too many people we should meet, too many social networks to check...

It's increasingly difficult to ignore all those wonderful opportunities life puts before us. On top of all this, we add the race to achieve such an excessive identity that it can end up overwhelming us.