Who are we, and what is our personal identity?

Question from the Internet:

“How does personal identity persist through time?”

Personal identity is something interesting. How do we know how we are? How can we define ourselves?

When we look at human society and the personalities of people, we are usually defined by many things, but none points to some kind of essence or a root.

Most of all, we are all the product of our environment. After all, we dress, behave, move, speak, consume even make love according to what we see from others or from the all-permeating media and entertainment brainwash. We like what others like, and if we hate what others like, we are just as much influenced by them, except in a negative way.

We define ourselves based on constant comparison to others. We all want what others have; moreover, our greatest happiness is when we have something others do not have or when we gain something at their expense.

So our personal identity is constantly defined by our environment, and when we move environments, or the environment is changing, we change with it.

So who we think we are has nothing to do with who we actually could be. We are reluctantly dressing into a character through which we can do best in a given environment.

We could find out who we really are; we could find our true essence and root of “our soul” in the right environment. If we built a smaller or larger — even global — environment that is built based on the finely balanced and mutually integrated template of Nature, in that environment, each individual could find and fulfil their unique, most optimal and irreplaceable role in serving the whole system. In return, each would justly and proportionately receive everything one needs and deserves in order to continue their crucially important, mutually responsible and mutually complementing contribution to the whole system.

This perfect society is not aimed at amassing surplus material possessions; it is not defined by quantitative growth, aggregate demand and ever-growing consumerism. This society cares only about providing the best platform for each person to find their perfect “cogwheel role” in the system since life is not about material possessions and ever-growing, more and more twisted selfish pleasures while we mutually destroy each other.

Life is about building life-creating and life-nurturing mutual integration between diverse and complementing parts — in our case, between individual human beings. Thus when we all become like healthy cells of the same integrated and living system, we will start to feel a Human existence we could not even dream about before.