Every human being plays many parts. If you’re at home with your parents, you play one part. If you’re with your friends at school, you play another. If you’re at work, you engage with people you might not otherwise talk to. If you’re with your boyfriend or girlfriend, you’ve got yet another role to play. Or maybe you play several at the same time.
So what does it mean, then, to “be yourself”? Which self does this advice apply to? Or is everyone thought to have a basic feeling of the self, which will always be there, no matter what the situation? And then you adapt it according to circumstance. Maybe that’s the way it is.
What I know is that I don’t know how to be myself. I don’t what this is supposed to be.
Maybe difficulty in certain social settings makes it harder to acquire all those roles that we are supposed to handle so well. I don’t know. The different roles I play isn’t something I think actively about. I don’t think many do. It just happens automatically. You adjust to the situation. Some merely adjust better than others.
Life is a big mix of experiences, desires, expectations, relations. They’re all interlinked and they constantly change. I think I’ve always thought about it in the way that everyone has a core that’s static. Everything that happens around us is fluent, but that basic feeling (some might use the word ‘soul’) stays the same. But maybe it isn’t like that at all.
Maybe we simply are our experiences. Our desires, relations, etc. Which means that we are in constant change, and at the same time can constantly change things around us. In way that makes it better. Or maybe it just complicates it even more. It’s still hard to know what to think when people say: just be yourself. Because whatever relations one might have with other people, only one thing is certain: the one and only person I’ll always have to live with, is myself.
This little post is inspired by this TED talk by Julian Baggini.
In a nutshell 