by Rachel Robison-Greene
I’ll never forget the moment when it dawned on me that I had arrived at middle age. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Nothing much had changed—my eyes were the same distance apart. My nose was in the same place. My grey hairs were still mostly hidden in my ample mane. What was suddenly different was how I interpreted my self.
I poured through my selfies on my iPhone with the intensity of Narcissus gazing at his image in a pool. Had I, just now, interpreted myself correctly for the first time in years? Had I somehow misunderstood myself until now in ways I should have found humiliating? Who is my “self” and who gets to determine who has it right?
It’s common to convey this general line of inquiry as a set of persistence questions. What is it, if it is anything at all, that allows a thing or a person to remain the same thing or person through time and change? Is a ship the same if its planks are replaced and what has become of the marble when it is carved into a statue—that kind of stuff. Less abstractly but more painfully, it is an existential question: how can I keep my grasp on sanity when the locus of my frame of reference and the source of my motivation shifts like sand? In youth, our sense of self is awkward and underdeveloped but also vibrant and life affirming. Part of the difficulty of aging is the recognition that the self is mortal, contingent, and unstable.
Consider popular expressions involving the self: “I wasn’t myself today,” “Control yourself,” “Keep it to yourself,” “know yourself.” These expressions don’t exhort us to be sure to persist through time and change; they press us to be cognizant of something else, something more fundamentally personal. Our selves matter to us in a way that they don’t—and can’t—matter to rocks, plants, or snails. Doorknobs aren’t concerned with whether the version of themselves they’re projecting to others is one with which they will be comfortable when they go to bed at night.
Philosopher and neuroscientist Patricia Churchland argues that developing a sense of self was evolutionarily advantageous for humans. A creature that could recognize itself could understand itself as having a welfare—things could go well or poorly for it from its own point of view. On this view, “driving” the self is like flying an unmanned drone through a simulator—the drone needs to be represented on a screen in front of you in order for you to know how to do anything with it. Similarly, for a person to be motivated at all, they need a simulation of themselves as a “thing” to be moved, in this case, a being with a body, perceptions, memories, habits, skills, and so on. The self is a projection of what we need to see to operate in the world while exerting as little energy as possible. As a result, my perception of self will not include an image of myself as a being who breathes or has a beating heart—I don’t need those facts before my conscious awareness because they happen on their own without the need for my “self” to get involved. We maneuver our bodies through life by directing the avatar that is the self toward what it wants.
One corollary of this way of thinking about the self is that it’s not always necessary for us to tell our selves the truth—in fact, sometimes it might be better to not do so. We see the “self” in some of our traits and not in others. We privilege the version of the self we are most equipped to deal with. This is compatible with a tendency toward both wishful thinking and denial.
It is commonplace to hear people say, “I’m young at heart” or “I’m 75, but I don’t feel a day over 40.” When I reflect on the fact that it has been 17 years since I graduated from college, I sometimes find it almost impossible to believe. My self feels young. Perhaps this is because our avatar selves do not change as our bodies change. They are not subject to the same environmental pressures.
Churchland’s insights about the nature of the self help to explain why it can be so easy to fall into self-obsession. If projection of self is evolutionarily advantageous, we’re likely hardwired to obsess. The very thing that keeps us alive is the source of anxiety and depression. Social media amplifies this behavior exponentially. Studies show that social media contributes to depression and anxiety in young people. One reason for this may be that these apps encourage us to turn the self into a brand and project it not simply as a personal avatar, but to our friends and even to the public for their approval or disapproval. When we’re caught in these loops, it can be helpful to engage in service for someone else—to take one outside of oneself. Many Eastern thought traditions teach that the self is an illusion that binds us to our suffering. Reflection on this concept can be comforting. The simulation is just a simulation.
Then again, there are reasons to believe that the self is more than a projection. Feminist philosophers of the self such as Susan James emphasize the important role of body in our understanding of self. They point out that historical accounts of self put little value on body—in fact, throughout the course of the Western intellectual tradition, body is often portrayed as a barrier to self-realization rather than as a crucial component of it. The “self” was often identified with the capacity to reason and the body was viewed as getting in the way of reason’s clear exercise. This line of argument was weaponized against women and minorities. Consider, for example, Cartesian philosopher Nicolas Malebranche’s description of the ways in which women’s bodies get in the way of their rationality,
…normally they are incapable of penetrating to truths that are slightly difficult to discover. Everything abstract is incomprehensible to them. They cannot use their imagination for working out tangled and complex questions. They consider only the surface of things, and their imagination has insufficient strength and insight to pierce it to the heart, comparing all the parts, without being distracted. A trifle is enough to distract them, the slightest cry frightens them, the least motion fascinates them. Finally, the style and not the reality of things suffices to occupy their minds to capacity; because insignificant things produce great motions in the delicate fibers of their brains, and these things necessarily excite great and vivid feelings in their souls, completely occupying it.
On this kind of view, our “selves” are our minds, distinct from our bodies. Bodies can assist in apprehension of the world, but they are also frequently the source of confusion. This way of viewing the self led people to imagine Freaky Friday type scenarios in which it was possible for a person’s mind to enter into another person’s body or for a disembodied mind to be uploaded onto a computer—all this without disrupting the self.
As James points out, however, though these cases may be conceivable, their conceivability does not entail genuine possibility. This is because we carry so much of who we are not just in our minds but in our bodies. We hold the memories of our lives in our bodies. The body is the thing that ran a marathon, gave birth to a child, underwent a surgery, or was the subject of abuse. As a result, in different bodies we would be different people.
On this view, a body is a testament to a life. It carries the memory of hot glue dripped on a leg while crafting a Mother’s Day gift, freckles from a long hike without sunscreen, and laugh lines from decades spent with a funny husband. When we think of the self, the body should be front and center.
Perhaps it is because our bodies are ourselves that aging feels so jarring. Our bodies carry signs of events, things that we did or things that happened to us. Getting older isn’t something we reflect back on as fundamental to our life story. It didn’t happen on any particular day but in the aggregate of days beyond our conscious awareness. We wake up one day forced to interpret ourselves differently.
It may be, however, that the self isn’t confined to a human shaped space. Selfhood may be more of a social activity. In The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity Kwame Anthony Appiah points out that constructing a self involves taking on social labels. These labels shape how we behave by providing us with reasons for action. The fact that I grade papers and carefully consider student concerns can be explained by the fact that I endorse for myself the label of teacher. Not all labels are self-selected; some are socially forced. Appiah says, “Identities, in this way, can be said to have both a subjective dimension and an objective one: an identity cannot be imposed on me, willy-nilly, but neither is an identity simply up to me, a contrivance that I can shape however I please.”In taking on the identity of a teacher, for instance, I take on certain social roles. It is not entirely up to me to decide what a teacher is or what she does. Some of those features are selected by the social environment.
Age is one such label that is imposed on us socially. If I lived a life of isolation, I might not experience aging in the same way that I do when I am embedded in a social environment. I am forced to think of myself in relation to other people. I am not a bare self; I am crafted by comparison. This comparison is highly contextual. Failing to settle on the appropriate comparison in a context can led to bad faith. This can be confusing in middle age because in some contexts one must recognize oneself to be old and in another to be young. Perceptions of age are also forced by an often oppressive set of social conventions. Surveillance capitalism is ready and eager to impose age related norms onto us—lipstick and lingerie for some and wrinkle cream and Botox for others.
At the end of a long day of teaching, I often think, “I’m sick of myself.” Projecting a self is exhausting. Before bed, I want to exit the simulation and enter screen saver mode. Aging adds additional complications. Our basic projection of self leads us in one direction, our embodied experience sends us in another, and social norms and expectations in yet another. There are no easy solutions to this set of problems. One way of responding is to linger in gratitude at the recognition that the existence of any selves at all, let alone any particular self was contingent and unlikely and yet here we are. Some might think of that as toxic positivity. Another response is to just let oneself feel the negative emotions that come along with these identity conflicts pertaining to aging. In my own case, I find some comfort in the recognition that aging is hard but it’s better than the alternative.
***
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.