Identity Crisis
Cause and Effect
As we grow spiritually and mentally, we are more aware of who we are. This development into our own individuality begins the day we are born till, sometimes, the day we die. Today people are unable to differentiate themselves from others and therefore have difficulty finding their identity. There are many reasons why this is prevalent in people today.
They’re many influences, pressures and events in our lives as humans that have caused us to continually search for our one true self. One of the causes to this is the sense we get to follow others. This goes back to the saying “Be a leader not a follower.” However, some people are better at being leaders than others are. The ‘others’, who end up being the follower, become more aware of someone else’s identity than they are of their own. Of course this is not the meaning of life or the way one should live through it.
However, many depend on others to give them the self-assurance they need to believe in their own ideas, opinions, standards, and choices. As one conforms to the ideas, actions, and capabilities of others they lose sense of their own characteristics and qualities. In his work On Liberty, Mill notes:
The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing only because others do it… Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing…It does not occur to them (conformists) to have any inclination except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke…they exercise choice only among things commonly done; (123-126)
As they make and converge the opinions, emotions and choices of others into their own, they lose the ability to form it naturally. Therefore, through the one-ness of a relationship, where people feel the need to compromise their own impulses, emotions, choices and actions for the benefit of the whole, many find it difficult to follow their own preferences later on.
As people conform they tend to blend their own basic human characteristics and capabilities to those of others. This is natural of people because many look for the sense of ‘belonging’ and ‘fitting in’ with those whom they associate with. However, this becomes problematic when it escalates, one can no longer develop and advance on themselves and all their capabilities and characteristics that naturally forms in us and that gives us an identity distinctive from another person. Furthermore, as we conform we lose the ability to understand oneself on a self-accepting basis.
The sense of self-acceptance that we receive through the presence of self-esteem is one of the most basic, natural, and unfortunately, lacking aspect in human beings. Through self-esteem you get confidence, which provides you with the ability to believe in oneself. It also provides self-assurance, which gives us the ability to know and understand oneself and individuality. Another aspect that we get through self-esteem is self-motivation and self-determination. John Stuart Mill wrote in his work On Liberty that:
The human faculties of perception, judgment and discriminative feeling, mental activity and even moral preferences… like the muscular, powers are improved only by being used…It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual of themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation. And as the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings (122-127)
Through this we are able to us our past experiences to provide our path, using our impulses, understanding and the outcome of the situation to develop the route we should follow. All these aspects develop and create the general phase ‘self-esteem’.
For those who lack self-esteem, many times, they are unable to exert these capabilities. Also with the lack of self-esteem people don’t understand themselves. Even though these aspects aren’t the only contributions to the development of one’s individuality they are the major in that without them you depend on others to provide them if you yourself are unable to develop them. For instance we wear what others wear because we are afraid that what we prefer isn’t good enough in comparison; we become involved in endless relationships because of the fear of being alone and not being able to provide one’s self with all the capabilities and functions of human beings; we act weakly on our impulses no matter how much we feel it need and importance to our life we simply ignore it for the fact that we don’t feel the energy or strength to make it happen.
So through conformity and lack of self-esteem we lose ourselves in our surroundings. One of the essential aspects of life is the development of one’s individuality. However, many people today are unable to differentiate themselves from others. One develops, instead of an identity, a dependence on others to provide them emotionally and mentally all the capabilities that should instinctively be developed. Beauty of one’s life and relationships and associations with others is found in one’s internal acceptance, self-esteem and identity. Also, even if we do allow others to provide us with the self-esteem we should provide our self with, it doesn’t make a relationship better it just weakens it. In the end, without the sense to depend on one’s self, they have no true self to find.