“You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.”
―Alan Watts
Consider a fictional character — your choice.
How might they respond to this very rhetorical question?
No, don’t cheat. Don’t keep reading without a sensory experience of an answer. Sit for a moment. Genuinely consider what they would say. Hear their voice, see their body language… what are they wearing? What are they thinking about? What actions would they take next?
I guarantee that you can imagine this scenario quite easily. Some part of you has internalised that character’s ethos, history, mannerisms, worldviews, tics and tats… and your internal language and forecasting ‘departments’ churn out a plausible what-next scenario for you.
Now turn those departments’ attention to your own behaviour. Tomorrow you will walk outside your home and stumble upon a strange man selling lemonade from a childlike stall. What will you say to him? Would you be likely to purchase a drink? What will your posture be like, your facial expressions, your acceptance or denial of eye contact?
Again — sit with this.
Observe that your mind has just functioned in a more or less identical manner to your earlier consideration of a purely fictional character: your brain chugged through the very same predictive models, while your “questioner-self” (the part of you waiting for an answer) was similarly placed on hold — your conscious experience extending barely beyond the dispassionate acceptance of an elevator trip.
In this sense, our brain contains many thousands of functional egos; the egos that you consider you are perhaps the most developed and nuanced, but many others would be sufficiently well developed to live a life with them. (It is likely, for example, that you could imagine a plausible Luke Skywalker or Hermione Granger response to any given scenario.)
Consider also that there are clearly several you’s, all variations on a theme. It is easy to imagine your work or family personas as prismatic snap-offs1 of some grander self… but where can that grander self be found? One never operates as this parent-self, can never chase down that frame of mind that incorporates all selves at once.
At best, we sometimes act as a reflective version of ourselves that comments on all the rest — but this self is no less a persona/ego than any other. If meditation and cognitive science have taught us anything, it is that no One Self To Rule Them All exists.
The liberating truth, therefore, is this:
You contain everything within you already to live as a different person — whether an improved version as one of your existing selves, or as some other ego or character buried within you, or as some fusion of the above.
It is difficult to do so, because most often our behavioural models adopt a certain persona by habit (when I walk into my office, my work persona ‘switches on’), and begins generating speech and actions from that persona.
Most of the time, these outputs precede any kind of conscious experience of them; when I am speaking to you, do I plan to use the word "because” before I have uttered it? No — my speech department independently produces the phrase based on some earlier thought, while my conscious experience is merely along for the ride to observe which phrase was chosen.
At other times, even when we can choose our words (within the constraints of whatever philosophy of free will you find most palatable), it rarely occurs to us that speaking as a fundamentally different ego is possible or desirable. Caught up in the heat of answering a challenging question, rarely can we stop to ask ourselves… “How would Captain Jack Sparrow answer this?”
In this way, our habit-chosen ego retains command and control.
These ego-habits equip us to consistently plan and improve our lives, and makes us more desirable to others for our predictability. The fact that my identity is comparatively static from day to day — fluctuating only mildly to adapt to a few key social contexts — gives our partners more confidence that we will be stable parents, our friends the ability to invite us to parties without the fear we will offend others, and our workplaces and banks some reassurance that we won’t flee to Ecuador the very next day. (Mind you, a healthy amount of corporate fear over employee loyalty is immensely desirable.)
Unfortunately, these ego-habits also enslave us: we too often find ourselves in situations where we wish we could act, think, or feel differently — but our active ego is unable to brainstorm anything that would be congruent with its previous behaviour, and that incongruence stifles any kind of productive action towards that goal.
”I wish I had the courage to dance”, we lament from the dancefloor sidelines… sipping a beer too often just so we can do something with our hands, feeling the condensation mingle with sweat and become clamminess, admiring the shape and dress and freedom of everyone but ourselves… “but I just can’t. I can’t even get up from my chair — there is an invisible mental wall there, some mystifying void of will, not even an echo when I shout ‘JUST GO!’ into the corners of my mind… it is simply not something *I* can do.”When people realise they are being limited in this way, the instinctive solution is to set about reforming the self. They envision an almost identical version of that same ego, but with a few productive tweaks. And they set about persuading that ego to adopt those new traits. They look for seminars or books or therapies that make sense to the ego as it already exists, but provide that ego with new arguments why it should behave differently, or mental skills to use in getting there.
This can certainly work. It should not be overlooked as a potential solution.
However, this path to freedom has at least two major faults. 1) It relies on the existing self being co-operative in its reform, and 2) it fails to make use of the fact that our desired traits are already inside us somewhere… waiting for us to summon glimpses of them with the correct thought experiment, fictional work, or psychedelic.
Our mind is *already* capable of all we seek, and there are much shorter pathways to it than careful, deliberate reform of a habit-formed ego that we may not even like that much anyway.And at last, the catch: even if we recognise that we adopt certain egos out of habit alone, and attempt to put on another… if we do catch ourselves at a party and ask ourselves how Captain Jack Sparrow would answer the question…
Why is it *still* so hard to become someone else?The answer is that there is a price of admission — the other selves that live within you demand recognition.
They will not accept mere status as an alter-ego, as a funny hat you put on for amusement every now and then, as a tool to grant you confidence for work presentations then be Kobe’d to the paper bin on your way out.
To act as another ego, you must believe them as real an ego as you feel about ‘yourself’. You have to genuinely understand that all your habit-egos (your Work Self, Family Self, Reading Self…) are all prismatic snap-offs of a grand ‘you’ that contains other characters, too. Models of all the personalities you have ever known — your own, your friend’s your favourite novelist’s — are cooped up in the same cognitive hardware residing in your skull, and they vary only in degrees of complexity, rather than of type.
There is a Jack Sparrow living in your brain: often dormant, but alive, and no less real than the egos you currently call ‘you’, or the version of him that exists in film or script. Your brain contains a version of his identity which has been filtered through another lens first, it is true — but this version is no less valid than any other.If this account of events seems uncomfortable, consider how deeply this idea is already enmeshed in your worldview:
You have no issue with the fact that your gut bacteria are part of you, and yet they are multitudes.
You have no issue with major processes occurring in your mind without your consciousness’ oversight. (Consider that for the vast majority of your time spent driving, you hand over responsibility for driving to some automatic reflex — trusting your life to processes happening without ‘you’ present.)
Somehow, you have even reconciled radically different conscious experiences existing within your brain — you spend 6-10 hours every night unconscious, allowing another entity you call your ‘subconscious’ to romp through your mind untethered, barely even keeping a log of what they’ve done…
… and yet when you wake, you will likely fail to question this experience, and equally likely find yourself unable to do so even if you tried.
Even with all humanity’s neuroscientific understanding, we still have only the most primitive tools to probe this other entity… and the literature is also clear that this entity is active within us essentially 24/7, giving shadowy input into all our decisions and making many of them directly.
Clearly, you are already comfortable with a much more complex view of yourself than the operating model you use on a day-to-day basis. ‘You’ are not merely an umbrella identity with beliefs, experiences, and personality traits layered under it… because that identity itself is also just a fraction of everything going on in your brain.
With all this said, then — why hang on to the marginally more complex idea that not-you egos are also alive within you?
Instead of your brain only containing 10 primary egos and a handful of weird other-entities (Subconscious, Intuition, Muscle Memory) of which ‘you’ are mostly unconscious… what difference does it make if you also possess 10,000 other valid egos sufficiently developed enough to live as? Is this picture of events really that much harder to accept than the alternative? And does any alternative model of your brain not simply raise more questions than it answers?
Let go.
Let go.
Stop hanging on so tight to strict boundaries of selfhood that you cannot possibly justify.
Your brain is a wonderland, a theme park, with a million billion rides to go on… and they are all equally built by the same biological machinery responsible for your ego.
Having a favourite ride or two is fine. Inevitable, even.
But you don’t need to choose to only ride your favourites. It’s okay to branch out, especially if they start to bore you or need some maintenance.
And indeed, you will never know which rides are your favourite without trying most of what the theme park has to offer.
I have dearly wanted to refer to ‘prismatic snap-offs' of characters for a long time now, having struggled to avoid (in my own fiction) making all character perspectives obvious alternate-universe versions of my own.
As far as I can tell, the phrase comes from Tom Bissell's review of Infinite Jest, which has clearly made some sort of literary impact on me.
Despite the clear recklessness and irrelevancy of the following belief, part of me hopes that should I continue to use the phrase — for I feel I have not yet fulfilled some mission it imposes upon me — then someone, somewhere, will trace back it to Bissell and give his review a well-deserved read.