I was intrigued, as a child, that a bottle could also be a woman. She had a job, this woman, holding syrup. But when it was all poured out, when she was empty and her job was done, she became something else.

— Eula Biss, Having and Being Had³⁰

I USED TO love personality tests. Myers-Briggs was a bit of a hobby of mine for a while (I'm an INTP: introverted, intuitive, thinking, prospecting). I was certified to consult on the Fascination Advantage system (Maestro). I introduced my clients to the Enneagram (Type 3). I've worked with the Big Five, StrengthsFinder, and the Via Character Strengths Assessment. Give me a computer screen full of multiple-choice questions and the possibility of a new insight into who I am or what I'm about, and I'll happily click “strongly agree” or “very unlike me” all day long.

After learning that I'm autistic—which did kick off with multiple-choice assessment after assessment—I started to rethink these tests. Take a simple question from a Big Five assessment: “I don't talk a lot.” Agree, neutral, or disagree? That's a big fat “depends” for me. A big part of my work is podcasting—literally talking into a microphone a lot. But on the other hand, in a group of strangers, I will absolutely not talk unless I have to. If I'm talking about one of my revolving special interests, it's hard to shut me up. I've had to learn to look for when someone's eyes glaze over to cue me to wrap it up. But on the other hand, if I have more than one or two meetings in a day, I won't be able to carry on a conversation with my husband. And there are times when I experience a “shut down” from overstimulation that renders me mute.

Personality profiles give us a framework for understanding ourselves. But they're not designed to tolerate much real difference. Functionally, if not purposely, they often work to train us toward change (i.e., personality improvement) or to cope with our deficits. As I process my autism diagnosis, I want to accept and integrate the differences innate to my identity. My differences were things I worked to change for so long, trying to overcome the ways that they held me back from greater success and achievement. For instance, on the Via Character Strengths Assessment, my lowest rated trait is—wait for it—love. The way I experience loving relationships will always be different than other people. I'm never going to be the kind of person who has multiple close friends and a circle of pals whom I socialize with regularly. I will never be the kind of person who uses physical affection or even affectionate words with anyone other than my daughter and husband. If those are the ways you measure my capacity for love, well, sure, I'm going to score low. But that doesn't mean I live a loveless life. It doesn't mean I'm unfulfilled or unhappy when it comes to relationships. It's just the way I'm wired.

We all have characteristics that make us different. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s so I got that message in an intravenous drip. Often, those differences are central to our many identities and how we understand ourselves. And at the same time, those differences are often the very things that we end up trying to change in order to conform. We try to overcome those differences instead of working with them. We labor to subdue those differences to become a better fit for the workplace, our families, or our communities. But as we do, we reinforce our suspicion that we don't belong or aren't good enough, making it difficult to accept our identities for what they are. While it will always take some adaptation to live and work together, there has to be a balance. We can't always sacrifice our differences and our identities in order to please those whose identities aren't perceived as different (e.g., white, straight, male, cis, upper-middle class). In an effort to find my own balance, I've learned to pay attention to when I'm adapting—or being asked to adapt—and negotiate for time and space to let my differences breathe. I need to be comfortable with my own identities so that I know when I'm compromising any one of them. I can't say that I'm close to fully processing what autism means for my identity and how I operate in the world. But I can say that becoming more familiar with that identity has made me less motivated to change my personality than I once was. I'm marginally more accepting of Who I Am. It's been a long road and taken a lot of work, though. Work that started years before learning I'm autistic. It's work that started with a question: Who are you without the doing?

I first heard that question in the middle of a workout while listening to the Hurry Slowly podcast. I was in my favorite spot in the gym—easy access to everything, but isolated and out of the way. I can still feel the rough texture of the gym's beaten up exercise mat under my fingertips as I listened to host Jocelyn K. Glei explain that a healer had posed that question to her: Who are you without the doing? Glei shared that she was trying to find the answer.³¹ I certainly didn't have an answer for myself. I wasn't even sure I could understand the premise of the question. It certainly derailed my workout—and the rest of that day. In many ways, that question spawned each of the other questions that make up this book. I had to find the answer—who am I without the doing? This question led me to exploring the nature of identity. I needed to know whether there was something innately “me” underneath all of my pursuits and accomplishments. I want to be clear: This chapter does not propose an answer to this question. I still can't describe an innately “me” identity—but trying to figure it out has been its own reward.

Who Am I?

Think about the last time you were asked to introduce yourself to a group. Maybe it was a new group of co-workers, some classmates, or a social group. If it happened recently, your eyes probably darted between the tiny black circle of your webcam and the window that held faces displayed from odd angles. If it was in person, maybe each member of the group sat, slightly nervous and fidgeting, while you stood to rattle off some biological details. What did you choose to say? Why did you go with that answer? As a facilitator, I've often had the surprisingly difficult job of leading a group of strangers through introductions like these. It seems like it should be easy enough, right? I might say, “Tell everyone who you are and where you're calling from.” But from there, things can get wild. One person might introduce themselves using their first name, occupation, and physical location. Another person might use their full name, a bit of personal history, current interests, and which room of the house they're in. And still another person might introduce themselves in relation to others (wife, dad, manager), their current project, and acknowledgement of the stolen land they occupy. Some people might take 30 seconds for their introduction while others take five minutes. Some will be self-assured, and others will be looking for approval from the group.

The way these introductions play out tells us a lot about the assumptions that are present in the group. If it's a work function, like a networking group, there is probably an assumption that title or occupation is an important identity to include in an introduction. If it's a parenting group, there is probably an assumption that including your relationship to your child is an important identity to include. But there are almost always outliers, too. There are people who prioritize other identities and view themselves in different ways than what might be expected. That reveals a lot too. Still thinking of that last time you had to introduce yourself? Consider how your introduction revealed the assumptions you made about how you fit into the group as well as what it revealed about your values and relationships. The varied ways we can introduce ourselves expose one of the key challenges to answering a question like “Who am I without the doing?” Who Am I is relational, situational, and multidimensional. There is no one essential way to answer that question.

Philosopher Kathleen Wallace proposes that we consider the self as a network. Other theories of self have had more of an essentialist quality; our identity is the psychological continuity we experience from birth to death or the simple fact of being a human biological organism. These two frameworks position the self as being contained within the body—either as the mind or our life-sustaining functions. Wallace explains that both of these frameworks are trying to get to the essence—the singular quality—of self. We can feel the shortcoming with that singular approach to self every time we get asked to introduce ourselves. On the other hand, Wallace's approach—what she calls “the network self”—is inclusive of multiple identities. Instead of expecting the self to be singular, even immutable, the network self theory creates the space for the ways we think of ourselves differently depending on context. Wallace accepts that the body and mind are key parts of the self but so are relationships—whether to communities, to social categories, or to other individuals. As those relationships change over time, so do those aspects of our identities.³² For instance, I haven't always been a wife or mother. But when I entered into those relationships, my identity shifted. I had a new self that influenced my other identities. Similarly, I spent 38 years thinking I was just a hardcore introvert with mental health challenges. When I learned that I am autistic, that aspect of self took on a new quality.

Wallace's approach makes a lot of sense to me. While things that I do certainly make up my network self (things like running, writing, or podcasting), they are not the only thing that makes up my network self. When I map my own network self, I see evidence of the multidimensionality of Who I Am. I can start to wrap my head around how I am both Who I Am when I was 8, or 12, or 22 years old—while also being distinctly different. At those ages, I wasn't a mother, a wife, or a divorcé. I wasn't a business owner, a writer, or a runner. Yet those are all key components of Who I Am now and how I conceive of the potential for my self to continue to evolve, as are the identities I held at 8, 12, or 22 that I no longer hold now.

Without the Doing

Exploring identity is key to exploring our relationship to goals. Goals are one way we've learned to express our identities or work toward a new identity. What we decide to do—the goals we pursue, the accomplishments we work for—is a way of either expressing how we understand an aspect of ourselves or an identity that will give us more power within existing systems. Both forms of expression can cause problems. For instance, self-delusion can lead us to pursue activities that don't actually line up with our authentic network self. Or, we can choose objectives that alienate parts of our identity in order to climb the ladder.

It's the latter that I'm most concerned with here. The mistakes—if we can call them that—we make as a result of self-delusion or a lack of self-awareness can certainly cause pain. But they also often lead to new knowledge and understanding. They become stepping stones on the path to self-actualization. But when what we do ends up alienating parts of our identities (maybe gender, race, disability, sexuality), we end up clinging to those actions because we've lost the tether to ourselves.

Psychologist and psychoanalyst Paul Veraeghe argues that our identities are transformed by the systems we operate within—represented by the market. The reason we feel such pressure to manage and discipline ourselves is because that's what the market requires of us. We seek new identities in order to increase our market value. The relationships formed within the market are mediated through our ability to overcome difference and climb the ladder toward greater power. Education, parenting, career development, even hobbies—they're all seen in economic terms. Veraeghe positions our contemporary Western understanding of identity squarely within the context of the neoliberal meritocratic environment. Our identities, therefore, are perceived within the genealogy of cultural systems explored in Chapter 2: supremacy culture, Protestant work ethic, and rugged individualism. Who we believe we are is based on what we do to climb the ladder. Or as Veraeghe puts it, “The individual's new identity as entrepreneur goes hand in hand with a new life goal: success. Success is something to be aimed for all the time—not just in exams, but also on holiday, in relationships, and in the workplace.”³³

On the Internet

To separate Who I Am from What I Do, we have to understand how much our identities are wrapped up in this broader social and economic context. This is only made more difficult by the technology we use to curate and amplify our identities today—technology that is largely used to signal our self-management, entrepreneurship, and market value. For many people, it's not enough to toil away at perfecting our market-based identities in the privacy of our own homes or cubicles. We feel compelled to broadcast that work on Instagram or TikTok. I'll admit here that I'm personally a bit torn on this.

Without broadcasting my work (both personal and professional) on Instagram or via my email newsletter, I would not be writing this book right now. I wouldn't have an audience of people who were interested in the things I think about or the experience I have to share with them. And in all transparency, I've intentionally pursued experiences that would “look good” on Instagram that have turned into truly meaningful additions to my life. But I also can't deny that any sense of “freedom” I have about what I post or how I share details of my life is an illusion. Just like in any quantified environment, I am heavily influenced by what is measured and who (or what) is doing the measuring. This influence drastically increases the likelihood that I'll select goals that “perform well” on social media (I explore why in Chapter 6). While I'm not always conscious of it, I look for a way to signal something about me that will connect with you. And unlike in a conversation where there is mutual exchange by which to evaluate the quality of that connection, on the internet, I have cold hard metrics. I know what I need to signal about myself by the likes and shares that signaling receives. This might not be how everyone uses the internet or social media. But the omnipresence of metrics certainly influences the way we relate to ourselves and others.

There's a line from Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror that hits uncomfortably close to home for me: “On the internet, a highly functional person is one who can promise everything to an indefinitely increasing audience at all times.”³⁴ I'm old enough to remember a time when “on the internet” would have been a qualifying phrase that aptly applied to just time spent online. But I'm also young enough that I've never known a professional life that wasn't molded by what happens “on the internet.” We've integrated the experience of the internet so deeply that the influence of likes and shares is bound to bleed over in “real life.” Your goals represent the promises you make to “your audience.” That audience might be your manager and coworkers, or it might be the audience that you're actively cultivating online, or it might even be your family and friends. These promises aren't necessarily bad, but they're not necessarily virtuous either. A promise might influence my behavior in a way that's meaningful to me, but it just as easily might influence me to conform to meritocratic norms that don't serve my well-being or contribution to society. What's more, as our actions are influenced by what Richard Seymour dubs the twittering machine, our identities are revealed to us by the algorithm.³⁵ Not only does the machine tell us who we are and who we will become, it turns around and sells us the symbols of this identity. My identity is commodified in an instant. Who I Am and What I Do On the Internet can feel like an act of self-expression, but they are more likely artifacts of conformity.

We can see this in stark display within the so-called creator economy. The promise of the creator economy is that, as an amateur individual, you can follow your passion and create content (e.g., photos, videos, writing, podcasts) that builds an audience and, eventually, creates a livelihood by leveraging platform technologies (e.g., Instagram, Substack, TikTok, etc… .). It's the classic “Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life” grift. In a survey by the research firm Nonfiction, 93 percent of respondents indicated that becoming a creator has had a negative impact on their lives. Why? Well, one reason is likely another data point on the survey: “70 percent say that a dip in earnings from an algorithm change could have ‘serious effects’ on their life. Looking at these findings, it's no wonder that 33 percent have felt anger, rage, or extreme frustration with major social media platforms as they navigate this uncertainty.”³⁶

Creators are basing their livelihoods on the performance of an identity through the expression of their knowledge, experiences, or talents. This performance is a sort of funhouse-mirror version of how professionals and the upwardly mobile have performed their identity for decades. The more the algorithm influences what creators decide to produce, the more it distends their sense of self. They decide on goals and projects to satisfy the current whims of the platform—and have to change course as soon as the platform decides to prioritize a new type of content or user engagement metric. Rebecca Jennings, who covers internet culture for Vox, has observed the consequences among TikTokers she's spoken with. They're driven to mold themselves into something “solidly monetizable” to maintain the fame that's become the basis of their livelihoods. Jennings writes, “They seamlessly toggle between their two identities—the real person and the online persona—and speak with a kind of cynicism about tying their livelihoods to a platform that could disappear in an instant. It all feels like stuff they shouldn't have to think about, not yet.”³⁷

The algorithm determines what users see. That means the algorithm also effectively determines what users create too because you can't generate income if no one is seeing your content. Yet, the algorithms that platforms like Instagram and TikTok use are always changing—and they're always changing in order to generate more ad money for the owners of the platforms. These platforms have no vested interest in the success of individual creators, of course. They're invested in building a space in which enough people create what consumers want to see. The platforms need consumers to spend copious amounts of time scrolling through content because that's how these platforms generate profit.

We can extrapolate this out into the broader economy and the way we conform to whatever “platform” influences the way we perform our labor. I think of conforming to the requirements of high school and then college, the standards of my first full-time job, and the expectations of entrepreneurship. The incentive structure of our educators, employers, or clients influences our behavior and how we understand our value to their enterprise. If teaching to the test will result in appearing more successful as an educator, then that's what educators will do. At the same time, students learn in a way that optimizes for test-taking. If employers are incentivized to reduce expenses, that's what our employers will do. And workers learn that they're most valuable when they cost the company the very least.

I think many—if not most—of us have experienced this in how we assimilate to a work environments. Even outside of particular performance expectations, every work environment has cultural expectations. Professionalism is a code word for one set of expectations—a construct of supremacy culture. Passion is another code word for a set of expectations—an evolution of the Protestant work ethic and the moral good of laboring in one's vocation. Efficiency and productivity are typically part of these cultural expectations, too. But even aside from these more wide-reaching norms, individual workplaces have idiosyncratic cultural expectations.

For instance, I spoke at Etsy headquarters during its initial growth period. At that time, Etsy was located exactly where you'd expect it to be located—in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn in a converted brick factory building. The office was full of people who clearly had better taste than I did—albeit in a quirky, vintage, Brooklyn-esque way. When I traveled there, I was extremely intentional about what I wore so that I had even the slightest chance of fitting in. I never did, and I always felt a little out of place regardless of how welcoming everyone was. Even when I managed the bookstore after college, I felt the pull to assimilate to our workplace culture. There, my co-workers all seemed so worldly—privy to musicians, authors, and films that I had no knowledge of. One co-worker obsessed on British pop punk, another obsessed on manga. I had my own obsessions at the time—contemporary Christian theology and science fiction—but they never felt like the way to really plug into our work culture.

The truth is that I fit into both of those environments more than I realized at the time. I might not have gotten the costume or the script quite right, but I was still playing my part well. But could I get even more into character? Certainly, my relationship to these work cultures influenced the goals I set and the ways I sought to grow. And my intention here isn't to suggest that that is somehow wrong or bad, just to observe the influence—and pose questions about whether our goals are our own or the result of the work we do to fit in and optimize our standing in the work environment—whether that's to performance metrics or to the latest hipster glasses trend.

Our success is not objective but relative to the decisions of those who hold the power. So as long as my identity hinges on What I Do, I'll set goals that optimize my performance accordingly. Now, I can imagine people reading—maybe you—who are ready to argue on this point. They set goals in opposition, in resistance, to the capitalist and meritocratic systems they participate in. Maybe then you find your identity in What You Don't Do. A relationship based on opposition is a relationship nonetheless. Your goals are still being influenced by the context of our culture.

Acknowledging the influence of external forces on our identities isn't all that different from recognizing that algorithms influence what you decide to post or share on social platforms. The question of how we navigate that influence—what parts of it we consciously use and which parts we discard—is key to the development of our sense of self. Exploring that question gives us a basis for pursuing what matters rather than setting goals based on what others deem good or productive.

Who Am I Becoming?

One of my favorite questions—and one that I'll ask you to answer for yourself later on—is: Who am I becoming? Whether we talk about precise targets, personal projects, or new habits, any change in our behavior will impact our sense of self in some way. By imagining that future sense of self, we can better evaluate whether what we might pursue is really what we want to pursue. This question also helps us identify stories, assumptions, and beliefs that make it infinitely harder to grow or change. Before we get into how we can use this question, though, let's look at the question itself.

While there are a number of fairly complementary theories of psychological development, I want to focus on one, that of developmental psychologist Robert Kegan. Kegan combines two modes of human psychology—constructivism and developmentalism—to create his theory of constructive development theory. Constructivism is the theory that we construct our own sense of reality and meaning as agents in the world. What we perceive isn't some objective, scientifically knowable thing. Our perception of what's “out there” is always a formulation of our cumulative knowledge and experience. Developmentalism, on the other hand, is the idea that we grow not only physically but psychologically as we get older. Originally, this development was thought to occur through infancy, childhood, and adolescence—with people over the age of 20 or so being “completed” psychologically speaking, much like we stop getting taller around puberty. But Kegan and others have demonstrated that psychological development can occur over a lifetime.³⁸

In combining these two schools of thought, Kegan constructs five orders of psychological development. The first two orders, the Impulsive Mind and the Instrumental Mind, you might think of as an “immature” mind. In these phases of development, we are at the whim of our material needs or individual concerns. In the third order of development, what Kegan calls the Socialized Mind, we begin to understand that others have their own material needs and individual concerns. We start to construct our relationship to the world as a relationship with others. We seek to better understand their values and positions not merely so we can figure out whether they can meet our needs but so that we can live together. We start to internalize the values of our community so that they become our values, too. We make judgments based on the thinking, “People like me do things like this.” This is the post-adolescent mind—the one that makes you “reliable” and “trustworthy,” according to Kegan.

The fourth order of development is the Self-Authoring Mind. During this phase, we gain distance from the values of our community so that we have more personal authorship over our own opinions and identity. We don't shrug off the values of our community, necessarily. We can just see them for what they are and make a more intentional decision to uphold them or deviate from them. Instead of using the idea “people like me do things like this” as a road map for how to behave (or what goals to set), we can see that, yes, “some people like me do things like this and other people do things differently.” We can choose to self-author by trying out the behavior of other groups or individuals based on our own sense of authority and intention. In other words, we ask questions that start to resemble, “Who am I becoming?”

Finally, the fifth order of development is the Self-Transforming Mind. This phase, which many adults never enter into, is defined by its ability to see one's own sense of authority at a distance. The personal values, identity, and relationships that the Self-Authoring Mind has been based on can be changed, built upon. I believe “Who Am I Becoming” is a question for the Self-Transforming Mind. To decide who you want to become requires a self-awareness that can not only perceive agency in how you construct your values and identity but the potential to grow toward new or evolved values and identity based on new information.

Today, most goal-setting advice published in the United States is directed to the socialized mind (Kegan's third order), maybe the self-authoring mind (fourth order). Goal-setting advice encourages us toward growth, productivity, and achievement. It instructs us on how to work harder and get ahead. And, of course, it fills our heads with positive affirmations and personal responsibility. In other words, goal-setting advice is building on the shared moral framework of neoliberal meritocracy. The problem? Neoliberalism serves the already powerful, while our systems of power are anything but meritocratic. We plod away as cogs in the wheel of a system designed to make us better and better consumers instead of creating real opportunities for self-actualization. One might even say that neoliberal meritocracy is an objectifying system intended to remove our agency and bend us to its will.

Objectification is the process by which a subject—an entity with the ability to act upon an object—is rendered powerless, reduced to a mere object. The subject-object dichotomy is key concept of philosophy that has been built upon over generations. The idea is simply that some entities—for our purposes, humans—have the agency to decide for themselves what action they will take, what resources they will use, and what end they will work toward; these are subjects. Objects, on the other hand, become the tools of subjects. They're reduced to their ability to fulfill the needs of subjects. You're likely already familiar with this idea in terms of sexual objectification. A human—most often a woman—is reduced to her body as a tool for providing a subject—most often a man—pleasure (or at least, arousal).

My argument is that most of us have experienced a similar objectification via our culture and economy. The goals we set assume a certain level of buy-in to the system that begs us to strive for the promotion, eke out a 2 percent increase in a key performance indicator, or ensure that our children never get more than the recommended allotment of screen time per day. The system commodifies our labor and colonizes our time with the intended outcome being that we achieve more on the job so that we can consume more at home. We've become tools for economic growth rather than agents who get to make choices based on their own moral guidance and authority. Or as journalists Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel put it, “Too many people who work hard and strive for success self-objectify as excellent work machines and tools of performance.”³⁹

The COVID-19 pandemic brought this into stark clarity. Grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, and food delivery drivers were objectified under the umbrella of “essential workers.” They were valorized for allowing consumers to keep on consuming. As the pandemic has worn on, objectified workers were assumed to be lazy and unpatriotic for not returning to unsafe work environments, finding a magical solution to the childcare crisis, or wanting to be screamed at by people who were irate about public health policies. Emergency support—increased unemployment benefits, hazard pay, safety measures—ceased as an “incentive” to get back to normal well before the pandemic ended. At the same time, consumers were urged to keep buying, to “support local restaurants,” and to “shop local.” Our patriotic duty was (and had been) to spend money. As citizens, we were objectified as tools of a consumer economy. The stimulus checks that were issued weren't relief—at least not toward the economic stress on citizens. Those checks were designed to relieve the stress on the economy. Relief that was geared to citizens would have been channeled into mortgage or rent help—rather than deferral of payment. It would have included free masks delivered to every household (before March 2022). No, that extra $2,000 was designed to be channeled right back into the economy in the form of home improvements, vacations, and takeout.

Maybe you were one of those objectified workers. Or maybe you've been the objectified consumer. (Or both!) The vast majority of us have some experience of objectification at the hands of the culture and economy we live in. That objectification absolutely extends to the goals we set and the options we consider for growth. Why go for that promotion? Well, I'll make more money and get to consume more—life will be easier. Why go to college? I'll get a better job and feel more stable. Why exercise daily? I'll be healthier (read: be a better consumer of healthcare), and I'll lose weight so that I'll have more opportunities for me at work and in romance. Okay, I realize this is a really cynical view of the reason we set goals. I recognize that, for most of us, we're not conscious of the conditioning that leads us to set the goals that we set. And, there is genuine desire behind many of the goals we set. You might want a promotion because you crave a greater challenge—the raise is just a bonus. Or you want to go to college because you love to learn, and you want the chance to really dive into one of your favorite subjects. Maybe you want to exercise daily because it's pleasurable.

Really, I'm not anti-goal-setting. I'm anti-objectification. I believe that the ways we've been sold on goals, planning, and productivity is just another way to turn us into better cogs in the machine. And I believe that, by shifting the way we set goals and organize our lives, we can reclaim our agency—and become self-transforming subjects who live lives that are meaningful and purposeful based on our own values and priorities.

Reflection:

• What traits, relationships, and identities make up your network self? In what ways you do shift between them on a daily or weekly basis?
• What identities do you try to hide or overcome to become more successful?
• How does the last goal you set reflect an aspect of your identity? How does it reflect an aspect of the systems you operate in?