Multiple selves

Last week I had dinner with a coworker a few decades older. Usually, we'd talk about the economy, hobbies, or other safe topics, but this time he was leaving the company. As such, we found ourselves on a rare topic: the human objective. I asked him for his opinion, and he paused for a while then said: freedom.

Freedom? I almost laughed. Not that this was a bad answer at all but, for me, freedom has always felt like the obstacle—far from the goal of life. He wanted freedom from work, from obligation, from the weight of having to be somewhere. Very sensible. But for me and my friends who grew up in the age of hyperabundance, the answer was so different.

The new generation has had infinite choice our entire life. Work is no longer a necessity. Travel is a duty, not a privilege. So, rather than freedom, we want spontaneous structure. Kind of paradoxical but, if you think about it, your mind is exactly this. Signals and synapses firing repeatedly, sometimes diverging to form new connections. It’s chaos with structure. So, now, coming back to the original question: with an unlimited amount of possibility, what do you do? How do you make choices?

The conventional answer is to “understand yourself” first. And with that understanding, find the answer. But that feels too simple. The self has never felt like a single, tidy story waiting to be uncovered. In fact, I sometimes doubt if it can be fully understood at all. There's a recent theory I was introduced to: self as network. Instead of a single entity, self as network says we are a collection of selves that are constantly evolving, interacting, and changing. The only real choice we have is to adapt. So rather than coherence, flexibility becomes the higher value. The real work of living changes from perfecting a single narrative to learning how to master attention. How to adapt without fracturing. How to branch rather than extend.