Be Yourself

You know what I find really odd advice. “Be yourself.” Strangest advice in the world. How can you ever not be yourself? If you’re not being yourself, who the heck are you being? Are you acting? If you’re acting the majority of the time, such that you actually need to be advised to be “yourself”, is that really who you are? How can what we are just a fraction of the time be our “true” selves?

You know what I think. There is no such thing as “yourself” in the sense of a singular, consistent persona. Every person is a jumble of mixed up, inconsistent, conflicting and competing emotions, desires, motivations, and priorities. Such that being “yourself” is essentially meaningless.

That philosophy book I read talks about this a little, saying how the early philosopher assumed a unity of the self (e.g. Descartes – “I think therefore I am”), but that later philosophers questioned that assumption. It credits the early existentialists and psychologists. For example, Freud proposed three competing components of the self, the id, ego, and superego. Freud was a fraud, but his notion that there are competing elements within the self was spot on. He wasn’t, however, even close to the first person to propose this. St. Paul is keenly aware of the divided nature of the self:

For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…. I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing…. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

In any case, yeah, “be yourself” is meaningless advice. because there is no singular self, just a jumble of things inside us. It’s more useful, I think, to advise people to prioritize one of the competing elements within. Like, be the person that is most consistent with how you comfortably act alone. Or, act consistently with your most important beliefs. That’s sensical, because it tells you which of the competing interests within you should prioritize.

Along similar lines, I rant about this way too much, but “keep it real” is also non-sensical. Keep it “real” to what? Your emotions? Your logical facilities? Your hopes and aspirations? They frequently conflict, so it’s impossible to keep it real to all of them.

What people really mean is to keep it real to your raw emotions and not hold that back. Which is terrible advice. Really, to always follow your raw emotions makes us no different from animals. What kind of awful advice is that? The sooner we can eliminate “keep it real” from our societal lexicon, or at least redefine what it means, the better off we will all be.