The Politics of ‘Finding Yourself’

Individualism, DNA tests, and Travel

Have you “found” yourself? Is such a goal even attainable, or are we bound to an eternal struggle of yearning for meaning and identity until we perish? Or will we one day be satisfied with the idea that life is a continuous experience of growth, learning, and development? In which case, does a phrase like finding yourself become nonsensical and empty?

There is no doubt that the concept of finding ourselves has deep reverberations within our society, the entire self-help industry is built on it. Our constant hunger for personality quizzes, from the psychological to the BuzzFeed variants, is a testament to our drive to learn more about ourselves, either as a drive to improve or to uncover some sort of hidden facet lodged deep in the mystical subconscious that we may be unaware of.

The concept of finding yourself is also a relieving practice of agency, reinforcing the idea that we have control of our lives and can shape them in ways that are beneficial to us, in ways that facilitate our understanding of ourselves. But even this is a contentious way of thinking, how much of us finding ourselves is accidental? Dependant on random decisions taken in a context that we’ve stumbled into? In this way, doesn't finding ourselves become an analysis we impose on our experience after the fact? After we have undergone the experience that has lead us to “find” ourselves? in which case wouldn’t discovering be a more accurate term to use?

The Big City

Movement is a central theme to the idea of finding one's self. The city has served as a backdrop for the abstract notion of finding one's self and specific cities have gained their notoriety for being an oasis for escape, places that allow you to be who you are.

Here, we stumble across another contradiction. If we are going places to be who we really are, then that requires an understanding of who it is we really are in the first place. We are no longer finding ourselves, just ridding ourselves from the things that are inhibiting us from being who we really are.

Interestingly, one of the biggest markers of belonging to a city is when one has adapted to it fully and has become like everyone else in it, a supporter of the local sports team, a master navigator of complex transit systems, aware of locally held events and interesting locations. This then has much more to do with losing who we were that becoming someone anew or a unique individual. Rather it is an extreme form of romanticizing a place to the extent that we subsume our identity into it — until we have given in to the cities cult of rituals.

The radical in this is that it points to a deep understanding that who we are is primarily shaped by the context we find ourselves in and is absent of agency. Agency really stops at the decision to go somewhere — an arguable statement as that decision is determined by various precedents. Beyond that decision, “finding ourselves” becomes less about the place we are going to and more in the idea of severing all social ties to where we where.

In this way we are not going to “find” ourselves, rather we are attempting to lose ourselves and the relationships we have formed in a context that has become saturated so we can be shaped by a new context. We are looking to be moulded and recreated by a place.

In an economic context, this process happens forcefully and is referred to as atomization. We, as individuals, are forced to sever our social ties, abandon our smaller towns, and our family, to start a career and seek economic independence. There is no doubt that this atomization also provides us with greater individual freedom, which is where the city gets its reputation of being permissive to social deviation (although, statistically speaking, it is only that these deviations are more apparent in a city as they are present in a larger number, not larger percentage), but whatever freedom is allowed is shaped and limited by economic forces more so than they are shaped by our own drives. Cities will allow these deviations as long as they do not contradict with the economic imperative that the city was built to perpetuate. It is for this reason that we see social movements and ideas adopted by business interests as new market segments. This does nothing but highlights the passive role we play in this mode of finding ourselves.

‘Wanderlust’

The need to ‘escape’ to find ones-self has manifested itself in the concept of Wanderlust. Here, a news item about an elephant being allowed to visit other enclosures to fight boredom provides a damning critique of our approach to travel and sense of displacement. The story was perceived by many to be an uplifting story of friendship, but is there any better way to describe the concept of wanderlust than our ability to leave our cages to visit the cages of others? Not only does this story show that the ability to travel is a privilege only available to a select few, but, more importantly, it exposes the concept of wanderlust as the ability to superficially engage with other places as they act as a backdrop to our own experiences where we remain completely ignorant to the struggles of those in other ‘cages’. Our lust to wander trumps any need to acknowledge our own privilege or connect with other cultures and struggles beyond the romantic view of travel and finding ourselves.

Illustration by Shitty Watercolor

Indeed the idea of wanderlust fetishises the idea of finding ourselves to a level where we are buying into the commodification of our own existence. The drive to ‘collect stamps’ and ‘make memories’ is, just like most motivational type platitude, completely disassociated from any sort of self-awareness, rather, it encourages the complete opposite, a dissociation from the self (from looking inwards) to be substituted with hedonistic outbursts that dehumanise us all and builds a commercial industry that is dependent on it.

Some may argue that one can travel while also benefiting the place they are visiting through voluntourism — travelling as a volunteer, often to less fortunate places to help out with some sort of project. However, it’s been largely agreed that this form of ‘volunteering’ does nothing as volunteers continue to bring no real skills with them. Volunteering has also been attributed to be more harmful to those on the receiving end by decimating local economies and morphing social relationships. The only good that usually comes out of these trips, as The Onion quips, is a bump in our own validation.

DNA tests

The banality of our efforts to ‘find ourselves’ reaches its zenith in the most recent craze of DNA tests. Several companies have jumped to occupy this space hell-bent on convincing us that the secret to who we are is found in the history of our DNA.

Besides the shoddy accuracy of these tests and the privacy concerns about private corporations holding onto your genetic information; DNA tests seek to convince us that the secret to ‘finding ourselves’ has absolutely nothing to do with the here or now or our current context and circumstances; as such, it presents us with the most dissociative quality. Furthermore, the DNA tests reduce the complexity of identity in multicultural societies and distort the politics related with identity and lineage.

In the simplest form of criticism, predominantly western takers of the tests fetishize their “otherness” once they can prove that their heritage while at the same time reprimanding recent arrivals for their “otherness”. In simpler terms, people who take the test can’t wait to find out that they are from somewhere else while holding a hostile outlook to those who actually are.

A more advanced critique would be that these tests actually seek to further atomize individuals, whitewash, and cover up identity itself. In the below ad an African-American is proud of her African heritage, one stripped of the political context in which one came to be African-American. For these corporations, DNA tests present some sort of superficial restitution, an acknowledgement of cultural heritage minus the acknowledgement of the massive and destructive forced migration that has gotten us to where we are now.

In this way, DNA tests are closer to horoscopes, allowing us to see what we want to see and take from them whatever resonates the most. They are neither here nor there but also indicate how fluid our formulation of who we are is — especially if they produce unexpected results that challenge our preconceived notions about our own identity.

None of what is touched on in this piece is to say that we should not go for experiences that can tell us more about ourselves. Rather, this is a call against the romanticisation, reductionism, and near religiosity found when the topic of self-discovery is discussed.

We should recognize that any experience we undergo will serve the mission of ‘finding’ ourselves. The more important question here though is what is it that we’re really looking for? And is the quest to find ourselves really about us actualizing our individualism or just a process in which we unconsciously commodify ourselves along the latest mould? As shown above, what we perceive as the way to enact our individualism often turns out to be the surest path to lose it.