I remember it well. Back then, I was not the anxious one. I too sauntered casually about campus. I too thought little of the looming future. I too lived the halcyon days of youth, carefree as a lark.
But those days passed, and the simile broke down, mostly because a young adult is really nothing like a lark in the first place. Anyway, then came senior year, with its assorted job fairs and information sessions, resumes and cover letters. And that awful, dreaded question: “So, what are you going to do next year?”
I’ve never had just one answer to that question. Usually my response is a hemming and hawing ordeal consisting of more qualifier than substance: maybe this or that, possibly something else entirely. I like maintaining the illusion that anything at all could happen from here on out, or (better yet) that everything will happen to me, so that I’ll get to live a bit of all my options.
Most likely, though, I’ll get to have only one of my potential lives, and the rest of the hypothetical Shining Lis out there—the doctor, the banker, the sociologist and so on—will remain just that: suspended in the cosmic void, hypothetical and forever left unrealized.
This process of choosing has always seemed cruel to me. At school, we’re allowed multiple affiliations, friend circles and even three academic concentrations. Nourished by student groups and by opportunities all vying for our attention, the different components of our identities blossom. Yet by senior year, our countless experiences and connections are whittled into one-page resumes and shipped off to prospective employers. And within the next several months, we’re starting all over again, having committed to a single job.
We could even look at it this way. Life plays out as an incessant pruning of un-chosen paths by a continuous self as it navigates through experience. We’re born in an initial form, with the vast majority of our identities left undeveloped. From the moment we first open our eyes, we have a near-infinite array of futures ahead of us, and it’s mainly left to us to pick the true self we’ll ultimately become. Along the way, we make choices and by doing so abort an army of conceivable selves.
If we see life as the narrative journey of a singular self, then pivotal decisions are of the utmost importance, and not just a little nervous-making. We’re beholden to our past choices and to our future possibilities, and if we slip up we’ll end up missing out on who we should have been.
But what proof is there that the accepted view of the self—especially one based on our untested, folk intuitions—is in any way accurate? After all, humans once thought the sun revolved around the earth, and we all know how that theory turned out.
Likewise, we might perceive our selves as continuous, irreducible entities, but what of the fact that, as far as anyone can tell, we are nothing more than our brains, and our brains are nothing but very complex machines designed to react to stimuli. An automated door reacts to stimuli as well, but I wouldn’t say it has a self.
What we term the “self” oftentimes refers to the string of memories and other conscious events that we then construct into personality, identity and expectations for future behavior. But memory is often faulty, and meanwhile, bouts of unconsciousness (also called sleep) are changing us all the time without our knowledge. We really can’t know for sure whether the conscious experience we have today has anything to do with the experiences we remember from yesterday. Who’s to say that the person I am now is the same person I was before? The only self I can be sure of is the present one.
All things considered, challenges such as these to the narrative self are bad news for traditional views of identity, but good news for a future anxious senior like me. If I have no continuous self after all, then I can let go of fears that I’ll somehow ruin it for a future me, or that I’ll disappoint a past me. We have very little to do with one another, apart from inhabiting the same body. Stripped of the grand narrative of my self, I have no reason to search for my true identity—each moment gives birth to a new self, with no obligation to my previous or future incarnations. I’ll just become a new me at every moment, with an entire selection of possibilities before me.
Imagine answering that to the next unknowing interviewer who naively asks you to “tell a bit about yourself.”
Shining Li is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
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