How to be yourself

Who are you when no one is watching?

Photo by Tim Bogdanov on Unsplash

Why do we feel the need to be accepted?

Why do we seek external validation?

Why do we care about what other people think?

Because we’re humans. 

We like to feel connected. 

We like to do things that other people are doing. 

As Seth says, “People like us, do things like this.” 

We all want to be part of a tribe. 

This need for external validation, however, has a dark side to it. As with many things, if done in excess, it can hurt us. 

The Watcher Watching Himself

Let’s go through a simple thought experiment.

Let’s say I am sitting in nature and observing the world. If I decide to meditate and observe myself observing the world, who is the “I” doing the observing? If there is an “I” doing the observing, is there another “I” observing the first “I”? 

As you can see, this ends up going into a strange feedback loop.

This is the theory that Douglas Hofstadter tried to illustrate in his book I Am a Strange Loop published in 2007. He claimed that there was only one “I” and that the observer is a self-referential entity that is observing itself observing.

A little bit like the Penrose Triangle:

Penrose Triangle

Although there is only one “I” when we engage in introspective work, there are multiple versions of ourselves when we deal with other people.

Who Is “Self”?

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life published in 1959 by Erving Goffman, the author establishes a parallel between social interaction and the way people act in theaters. For Goffman, people perform as they present themselves. The nature of the performance can change based on the “audience”, which is defined here by people in the surrounding environment. 

For Goffman, every social interaction is organized around a “working consensus.” The working consensus refers to the meaning we give to the situation we are in and how we subconsciously decide to act with a person. It is usually created during our first interaction with someone and it tends to persist over time. When you decide to be nice to someone, chances are that you will try to maintain that image in the future and be nice to them. The same principle applies when you show someone that you dislike them.

How I Met Your Mother, Lily, and Associative Regression

How I Met Your Mother Cast

There is a concept in the TV show How I Met Your Mother called “associative regression” and it describes what a working consensus can look like.

According to Urban Dictionary, associative regression is “the tendency of a person to revert back to an older version of themselves when around people from their past.” 

In one episode, Lily meets a friend from high school she had not seen in over a decade. After meeting her friend, she reverts back to the version of herself she was when they were both in high school. Although she was way past that phase of her life, she started to talk, act, and laugh as she used to when she was around her friend in high school. 

This example helps put in perspective what Goffman calls working consensus, and how, based on who our interlocutor is, we bring a different version of ourselves to the surface. Because Lily and her friend already had a “working consensus”, a set of fictive rules that gave direction to their interactions, they both felt obligated to bring back to life these old versions of themselves. 

This is the same phenomenon that happens in everyday life.

In school, for example, students and professors create a working consensus about how each and every meeting will go. This working consensus is usually created during the first meeting, and for the class setting. Both parties agree that the professor will be teaching and that the students will be listening during the class. 

Different Versions of Ourselves

Photo by Robert Zunikoff on Unsplash

The creation of a working consensus is mandatory as it defines the situation for us; however, we are only able to create many working consensuses because we have many versions of ourselves. 

When we enter the presence of someone for the first time, we try to present ourselves in the most appealing way possible based on the information at our disposal. 

When I am with a friend at my place, I am not afraid to make silly jokes or act “inappropriately”. I am relaxed, and the environment signals that there is nothing at stake by acting the way I act, which is very casual. This environment creates a definition of the situation (working consensus) where my friend and I know that we can bring to the surface versions of ourselves that can be childish, or silly.

The working consensus changes with the context.

Say I am in class with the same friend. Even though we are still talking about the same people (him and I), the fact that we are in class will bring out another facet of our personality. This will create a different working consensus between us and we will behave differently even among ourselves. We might try to act more “appropriately” (acting as a classroom environment wants us to act). Also, knowing that we have an “audience” watching us, we might not tell the same type of jokes that we would tell in a more casual and intimate place. 

We create versions of ourselves based on the context. This version of myself is different from the one that was sitting at home with my friend, or the one sitting in class with the same friend. I am one person, with different presentations of self. 

The Three Masks

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The Japanese say that we all have three masks: one that we show the world, one that we show to the people close to us, one that only we know of.

There are three levels to this. Although we tend to wear different masks when it comes to the first level, we only wear one mask on the third level. 

I believe this has two implications. 

The first one is that our external identity is always changing. The face you show to the world will change depending on whether you are talking to your mom or your boss.

It is hard to know and predict how this will change in the future because the environment we find ourselves in is always changing too.

We should not try to cling to our external identity. This part of us is defined by how people perceive us, status, and things that we have little control over.

We will never truly get to be ourselves if we solely focus on the “first mask”. Trying to understand who you are at the surface level is a lost cause.

The second implication is that we have an internal identity. This is the mask you wear when you are alone in your bedroom late at night. It is the person you become when no one is watching.

I think this is where personal growth truly happens. When you get to know yourself, you make your internal identity stronger.

Our time will be best spent trying to understand who we are at the third level. To use an analogy from the movie Inception, we must get to the third level of the subconscious mind to really make meaningful change.

The Third Mask

The three faces of the King taken by nienaber.fred

Before you become who you are supposed to be, you need to know who you are. This takes a lot of introspective work and trying to understand who you are when no one is watching. It means focusing on the third mask rather than the thousands of versions of you that people get to see. 

Why do we feel the need to be accepted? Why do we seek external validation? Why do we care about what other people think?

Because it benefits us. People like us better when they see parts of themselves in us. They like us better when we have a great working consensus between us. Although it is important to present yourself to the world in ways that will benefit you, you might never get to be yourself if all your focus is on the first mask only. 

Be yourself, know yourself

To be yourself simply means to know yourself and to know the person you are becoming when no one is watching.