Knowing Who You Are in The Modern World

Who am I? Who are you? Simple sounding questions, but understanding how the answers are formed is to understand how society works. In a simpler (hunter-gatherer, or agrarian) time the answers were easy to come to. For example, I am a son of a farmer. That might connote that I will be a farmer, that I help feed people, and that I work with the seasons and the land. You are a daughter of the potter, so will be a potter. You make the crocks the food I grow goes in, and you know I will trade a dozen eggs for a pitcher. Being a tanner, however has its own, perhaps dirtier, connotation. This may be the same method of how identities work today, but the understanding of the identities themselves seem more complex than ever.

As society has become more complex, humans have to deal with multiple interactions to accommodate these complexities. People may not always behave the same way when they are with their parents as opposed to being at school, or with their friends at a party. When we are shifting our behavior, we are often shifting or masking our identity. This carries with it the risk of being confused, conflicted, or creating self-doubt. If we behave in a way with our friends that we know would disappoint our parents, we are creating this internal discord. If we do this enough, we run the risk of asking ourselves the question, “who am I” and having to say “I don’t know” which can leave us adrift.

This problem is compounded by the technological world we live in, where facetime has become less important than facebook. In simpler times, kinship was all that many families or communities had. Bonds held people together in difficult times and allowed them to share joy in the better times. In the modern world with highly mobile individuals and professions, much of this kinship has been lost. Kinship is still important to me, and my family is very close. We maintain aspects of our cultural heritage that place a high value on kinship and make sure we take time to build the bonds between each other and our community.

While our social and cultural identity can play a role in determining our relationships to our friends or enemies, it may go much deeper. On the face of it, my cultural identity may tell me to treat my friends in a certain way and my enemies in another. Maybe I share food with the former and ignore the latter. Socially I may help my peers and try to harm my enemies – to the extent that my morays and the law allow. However, my social/cultural identity may not just determine how I treat the friends/enemies but determines who they are. When we are raised we learn to identify who our friends and enemies are by using the toolkit we are given by those who raise us. This is certainly something to be aware of, particularly if we ever want to consider changing aspects of how we see the world.

To conclude the essay, the world moves very fast and access to different ideologies and ideas is greater than it has ever been in human history. The telephone, the cellphone, and the internet has connected people in ways and at speeds never seen in human history. These developments have created a world with levels of complexity that we have never seen before. These technologies have improved our lives in many ways, but maybe we should remember to take time to be with people we care about, to have more facetime and less facebook.