Sorting the Self
18th July 2025
“We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers…and there is good reason for this. We have never looked for ourselves—so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves?”1 Much has changed since the late nineteenth century, when Nietzsche wrote those words. We now look obsessively for ourselves, and we find ourselves in myriad ways. Then we find more ways of finding ourselves. One involves a tool, around which grew a science, from which bloomed a faith, and from which fell the fruits of dogma. That tool is the questionnaire. The science is psychometrics. And the faith is a devotion to self-codification, of which the revelation of personality is the fruit.
Far too many people spend copious amounts of time trying to ‘find themselves’. Bullshit. You are who you are. There is nothing to find. If you need to ‘find yourself’, you’re looking in the wrong place; under the lamp-post because the light is better there.
What these people are looking for is someone they can pretend to be. Most people refuse to deal directly with reality, dealing instead through an artificial construct of who they would like to be (or, more usually, who they would like to appear to be) at second-hand. Cary Grant famously said, “I pretended to be the person I wanted to be until I became that person” No, he didn’t. He just got world-class at pretending–he was, after all, an actor, whose living depended on it.
They have a self-image based on their looking at this constructed image through the eyes of others. Depending on the opinions of others, this self-image is beyond their control and very fragile, easily damaged and almost impossible to repair.
Those who prey on such people are invested in this process and its cultivation, like race-hustler Jesse Jackson leading slum children in a chant of “I AM SOMEBODY!”, nobody involved realizing the fact that if you were actually somebody you wouldn’t have to chant about it.
“Find out who you are and then be that person.” No. Just be the person you are. That person knows what is appropriate to The You That You Are without any effort. If you don’t like what that person does, then fix it, but don’t pretend that you are somebody else.