Identity is emergent

People often discuss identity as if it’s static. You can find your identity and then that’s it. You now know who you are. However, over time your values change. Your interests and preferences change with them. You become someone else.

At work, I’ve been creating a professional profile builder. One of the ideas we’ve kicked around is showing a profile as a timeline. It seems obvious that it would show natural progressions.

However, people’s lives aren’t clean like this. Even careers aren’t clean like this. Showing the things you’ve done in sequence will not produce a clear narrative.

People’s lives are a mix of happenstance and intent. They learn and grow as they go through ups and downs. I’ve shifted my attention away from purely technical pursuits. Then AI came along and necessitated that anyway.

You could write a stack of narratives about any given life. Each one could be true but they would all be incomplete.

I’m personally fascinated with the concept of emergence. I love art and games that build complexity out of simple rules.

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole.

Identity is an emergent property. It’s the result of our values, opportunities, and actions and how they change over time.

People don’t have an identity baked in. We look back at the things we’ve done, rationalize, and create narratives. These narratives become a part of this evolution. We use them to reflect and reconsider who we are.

Profile builders focus on events and narratives. But this is a surface look at the outputs of who you are. Any given profile builder is the same because they are presenting the same surface.

I want to help people explore the rules and behaviors that sit below. I’m not sure how to do that yet but I’m excited to figure it out.