The notion that every person has an undiscovered self within them is the idea that influences modern life as much as any other. We read it all around us, in social media slogans and in the good-intentioned advice: find yourself, discover who you are really, and listen to your inner truth. It is liberating, almost spiritual, as though our identities were some buried artefacts awaiting our removal of the dust.
However, when individuals are serious about this idea, it can only turn out to be a complication instead of an enlightenment. Young adults are reluctant to select careers, as they are afraid of making wrong choices. Adults who have changed are found to be ashamed and feel that they have lost track of who they are supposed to be. When a person has lost a passion that he or she was passionate about, he or she will be wondering whether he or she has betrayed something that was fundamental in him or her.
The assumption of some undercover, predetermined identity is promising but, in most cases, anxiety-inducing. And this is where philosophy comes in as a surprise and is quite practical.
The Search for a Hidden Self
The idea of a real self provides emotional solace since it indicates that life is not quite as open-ended as it appears to be. When there is already an identity, then there would be less risk in the choice. We are not making a life, and we are just finding one. However, this reassuring thought silently sets a heavy weight: when your true self is immobile and awaiting discovery, not knowing becomes failure, and transformation turns into a sign of being lost.
This story is made difficult by everyday life. One can be convinced that he or she was destined to follow a specific major only to realise that he or she is satisfied elsewhere. A person who continuously believed he or she was introverted may be successful as a leader. These disruptions are not signs that the individual has finally reached some sense of identity, but are signs that identity is made by action.
And that leads us to a mere yet earth-shattering realisation: maybe there is no actual self to disinter. It is probably not that the self is an object, but that it is a process.
Existentialism: You Become Yourself Through What You Do
Existentialist philosophers dispute the notion that identity is some treasure hidden within that one needs to discover. Sartre said existence precedes essence: we are not made before we are. Rather, we are initially created, and only subsequently, through decisions, commitments, and responses to our situations, do we make ourselves who we are.
This does not mean that we lack tendencies or temperaments. It only implies that they do not define us as we act upon them.
Consider the student who is tortured in deciding what the right degree is when she knows that it matters not what degree she has but what she is like deep inside. An existentialist would say it is her decisions that will shape her identity and not vice versa. It is only after playing in those worlds that one knows whether she is supposed to be a teacher, engineer, or artist.
Simone de Beauvoir refined this notion by indicating that people commonly use the concept of the fixed self to escape accountability. Somebody saying, ‘This is just who I am,’ would be a possible effort to avoid the pain of the change. However, existential freedom is the ability to recognise that we are influenced by our past but are never bound to it entirely.
So, our identity is not something we find, but something we must do until we die.
Pragmatism: The Self Emerges Through Experience
Pragmatist philosophers like William James and John Dewey arrived at this conclusion from a different perspective. They argued that identity develops through interaction — with problems, with opportunities, with communities. To them, the self is not so much an essence but an ability that is acquired through repetition.
Consider a person who travels to foreign countries in search of self. Pragmatism would respond: the place does not tell identity, but the experiences that the individual is going through, solving unanticipated situations, and changing to new social rules do. The experiences transform the individual, not because those experiences were an eye-opener, but because they brought forth new abilities, new habits, and new insights.
Dewey thought that it is through reconstruction, the constant remaking of human beings, that they mature; they make themselves again and again according to life. The self is life, not some blueprint. This perspective can be used to understand how individuals can transform radically with time: new roles, relationships, and responsibilities elicit new selves that we ourselves could not have envisioned and predicted in the past.
Whereas existentialism puts emphasis on freedom, pragmatism puts emphasis on growth. They break the myth of the fixed inner self together.
Why the Myth Endures
Despite philosophical thinking’s long-standing challenges to the concept of secret identities, why do we still cling to the myth?
Since it protects us against the pain of being lost. If we already have a shaped identity, change becomes less frightening, disappointment becomes less personal, and decisions become less risky. The myth enables us to think that we have a perfect, smooth side of ourselves beneath all our contradictions.
Sartre referred to this temptation as bad faith, the desire to make ourselves ‘fixed things’ instead of ‘free beings’ in charge of our decision-making. It’s easier to think we’re finding fate than to admit we’re making a life with no guarantees.
But life will not sit there and take its time. Humans develop due to the changes of circumstances, love, sickness, migration, failure, success, accidents, and ageing. To stick to a real self is to stick to a frame of a film that is continually changing.
Rethinking Authenticity
Modern society tends to define authenticity as being true to oneself, as if there is only one truth inside a person to follow. But existentialism and pragmatism provide a more practical and less strained understanding.
Authenticity is not inner alignment; it is conscious authorship. It is the readiness not to wait till it dawns on us but to make a choice. It is the will to take action and not to be covered by the myth of destiny.
When we comprehend authenticity as authorship, we no longer have the fear of making the wrong choices. No secret self is there to betray. It is just the self, which we shape by our actions, the one that we constantly perfect.
The Courage to Create Yourself
Releasing the myth about a fixed self does not imply that reflection is a useless activity. Reflection enables us to know our past, our trauma, and our wants. But it does not show us a last and lasting answer to the question of who we are. It unveils the materials with which we are compelled to work.
The identity develops in the bargain between what we have been and what we want to be. Failure in the past might make us, but not our course. Strengths unknown to us may be roused up by an added duty. Selfhood is not a kind of excavation; it is crafted gradually by labour and fancy.
It is the silent bravery existentialism seeks: to understand that no one is going to give us our identity. We must make it ourselves.
Conclusion: The Self Is a Verb
The self is a noun: it is a complete thing that is concealed somewhere inside, and the command to find yourself presupposes this fact. But the truth of philosophy reveals us a more liberating fact: that the self is a verb. We act, revise, and remake it.
One does not find identity, as one would find an artefact buried in the ground; identity is a craft.
We are not puzzles to solve, but rather projects to participate in.
The actual question is not, ‘Which is my real self?’
The actual question, the one that sets free and is not in chains, is:
Who do I want to be, beginning at this point?