Philosopher's warning about modern identityfrom @glass__museum

Transcript

MBTI on Cool Girl is what Sartre warned us about. Jean Paul Sartre, an existentialist philosopher and self proclaimed chopped rank, is famously accredited for the claim that existence precedes essence. What he meant by this is that humans aren't born with a predetermined nature that determines who they must become. Unlike objects whose purpose is defined before they're created, humans first exist and only later define themselves through their choices. In other words, there's no fixed human blueprint for who we're supposed to be. Best on the other side of this freedom is the anxiety of being responsible for constructing our identities. He writes that man is condemned to be free because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. So instead of embracing the anxiety that comes with this freedom, he argues that most find ways to escape it as people turn to systems that promise clarity about who they ought to be. Throughout history, religion often fulfilled this role. But in increasingly secular societies, people are finding Good in other places. Pop psychology, 20 year olds on TikTok, Mel Robbins. Take the widespread popularity of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, for example. Now I love a personality quiz as much as the next worse. Like, trust me, I grew up on BuzzFeed quizzes. Indeed, MBTI is actually pretty accurate in my personal experience. I mean, you literally answered the questions yourself. And so I think it can be a useful tool to help people understand themselves and communicate effectively with others. But the issue arises when these categories shift from being descriptive to prescriptive. Instead of seeing it as a framework that can describe patterns in one's behavior, it becomes a problem when it starts to constrain who we think we can be. We see this prescriptive nature in places like South Korea, where MBTI has become so socially prominent that they influence dating preferences and even hiring decisions. Not only that, but we also see this in contemporary aesthetic culture. Historically, aesthetic styles emerge organically as a result of particular lifestyles or social environments. But increasingly through the visual nature of online culture, people have begun to adopt certain aesthetic superficially in order to present a certain essence. People want to be cool girls, so they copy paste the aesthetics of it onto themselves by buying micro trends. People want to be disgustingly educated, so they find a messiah on YouTube to tell them exactly what to know and read. But things like being cool or smart have high social currency precisely from the fact that they can't be bought. And yet, we have people trying to superficially emulate the aesthetics of it anyway. Instead of having aesthetics emerge naturally from how someone lives, people are adopting aesthetics first and then treating them as scripts for identity. In existentialist terms, they're letting their existence follow a predetermined essence. And so in both cases, we see how categories that were originally descriptive begin to function as prescriptions or how individuals ought to behave. Labels are inevitable in a scrupulously categorized and empirical world. When it comes to something as complex as human identity, every classification inevitably leaves something out as we attempt to distill the infinite into the finite. So while personality types and social identities may offer useful ways to describe certain aspects of ourselves, they should never be mistaken for the totality of who we are and who we're capable of being.