Identity

Once again I find myself at a loss for words. At the moment the clock is half past 4 and I am sitting at my university, across the table from my group members working on our paper for one of our courses. It has to be done by monday, and this is the last attempt to get something written down while we are in a relaxed mood. The weekend will be reserved for the desperate last-minute-writings, and we all know that those are probably not going to be as good as the rest of the paper. A slight bonus might be that they are more in thread, because they have been written close to each other, as opposed to the rest of the paper that has been spread out of the past month.

So to bring this into a more social perspective. I suppose you could say that this resembles the general attitude towards life. There is work and then there is life. Prior to the boom of the 50s it was more of a situation where work was life. The social residue from this is that people still largely identify with their professional position. What are the consequences of this? One such consequence could be that people are rooted too much to stay adaptable. If you root your identity in an industry you become dependant on it and not only financially. In this current state of rising global unrest, it is probably not preferable to be reliant on a certain attribute of a system that could very well be overturned soon.

For what is one without an identity? One could be many things, but the awareness that is part of the identity is quite relevant for a human being. The identity is, among other things, the ability to filter what is relevant for you personally and what is not. You would simply be bombarded with too many micro-informative elements if you had to relate to everything going on around you all the time.

As an example we all know how a mathematician can sometimes notice patterns in every day life that the rest of us simply do not see, and would probably never notice. A salesman would probably try and work out the value of every offer he is considering. And perhaps a dentist would notice the strenght of a set of teeth when everyone else just notices the general value of the smile.

And because of this personal filter it is quite obvious that we get absorbed into our professional lives and, through our identity, become what we do.

Evolution does, however, teach us that only the adaptive species survive. Just as how we will soon have to deal with peak oil and the massive consequences the lack of fuel and plastic will have on our consuming culture, on a more individual level the adaptive people within the greater society of people will probably have a greater sustainability.

You might even label it survival of the fittest.