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Identity in the era of commoditization

This could easily be the title of a book or a Ph.D. topic, but I would like to follow this though from a very specific angle.

In his book Digital vs Human, Richard Watson argues that today’s world is changing so fast that we no longer have the time to adapt. Our resilience needs to increase with the same speed of innovations and commoditized industries and goods around us due to those innovations. Human brains have limited capacity to incorporate stress factors. We are limited by the number of resources we can use at once without depleting ourselves completely.

I am a millennial and we are told we are the generation of burnouts. This is a generalization made to suggest the increasing number of young professionals who are entering the workplace already used out of resources from the previous stages in their lives. We’ve had to Ace in school, please parents who have been working from the 70’s until today through a lot of economic paradigms and realities who had parents from the war generation and manifested their personalities through the hippy movement which is a way of getting the frustration out of the system in a shocking way. Since then, as I said in another article ( I was much younger back then so please forgive my language skills), we’ve had the global nomad phenomena taking over thanks to a lot of technological factors as well as a more global market and work dynamic. Intercultural families have been on the rise. We’re seeing more 3rd culture kids than ever.

We need to redefine the notion of identity and we need to do it fast!

We are living times of great change in our environments ( economic, cultural and social) but at a much softer level than a war. The war situation is directly related to the reptilian brain and surviving. It triggers the more evolved part of our brain to come up with a solution to calm the alert system in this primary brain. But once these outside signals are less loud, since we keep hearing that we no longer need to feel the fear of surviving and we can concentrate on growth and stability, the sense of urgency is diminished. This is the reason why the subtle ways in which we are faced with stress factors remain an unseen outlier. As long as we don’t talk about it, it means it’s not important. Yet, once we start talking about it, we realize it was always there. It has been the source of most of our decisions, it has influenced our identity.

We need to make it a conversation in order to make it an aspect of urgency.

Identity depends on stable factors in our lives: the place of birth, the sense of belonging to a community for a longer period, the path we choose to develop knowledge, anthropology and many others which need time and facts to build up a comprehensible set of outliers. Also, homogeneity is an important factor in preserving many of the most traditional aspects of identity.

While we live in the era of Tribes by Seth Godin which says we can no longer group people by sex, age, and area of living because that will never tell us buying habits or actual motivations factors about those people, we are also the generation of grouping voices based on hashtags ( see the #metoo movement and you’ll get what I mean). In essence, we are becoming more “land independent” for the way we define our identity.

Here are my top 5 outliers about this shift in identity which ultimately relates to my current area of study in resilience and rewiring of the human brain for facing these new challenges:

1. We see countries and places more as infrastructure than a resource for our identity. As such, we can detach emotionally from a place, travel to form a bigger horizon and perspective about the world and choose where the environment offers us the conditions for us to build upon and develop what is our real goal. That is, not serving the land, but using it to make the most out of our existence on it.
2. In times of great turmoil on the political scene, we find our smaller groups and we develop activist minds and challenge the status quo. We no longer follow democracy as the only “religion” and we accept and embrace more opinions about this.
3. As the workplace environment is going through its rapid paradigm shift with digitalization and many of previous jobs being taken by RPA’s as explained in the book of economist Klaus Schwab, resilience in the workplace is the most important skill we can develop. So how can we be confined by the limitations of a specialized field? How might we stay agile in such an environment if our skills set are limited to a niche? But at the same time, how might we be the best candidates if we only hold transferable skills? As such, being able to hold a good balance between these 2 ( 80% niche skills and 20% transferable skills) will keep us on top and help us more easily pivot careers later in life. Sticking to the identity given by work title no longer holds the pace with paying bills.
4. Since we’re talking about bills, homes and especially owning homes becomes more of a notion of economic interest than identity. We used to have generations that bought a house and formed a home based on the resources provided by those walls. Within the space of those walls, our childhood would unfold. We’d form identities based on a space, and we no longer do that. We rent or buy to respond to the need of expressing and maintaining a certain lifestyle. We’re owning a place until we outgrow it. We no longer set the limit of our growth in the size of our space.
5. Looking at the size aspect, identity is no longer about the number of things/people we know in a certain place. Identity is about the number of places/people/cultures we’ve mixed. We’re choosing what we want to be like based on the experiences we’ve had and shaped us. How can we only be European if we like Indian food and Japanese interior design? I’ve recently read about the exquisite taste of famous dictator Kim Jong Un. This guy is what we used to see in celebrities in the music industry in the last 20 years or so. He has formed his opinion based on extensive experimenting opportunities and is now defining his identity and personality based on a constellation of products that have nothing else in common than price ( all of them being in the luxury class).

The only problem in the end with such a chameleonic life is that being more complex takes more resources to use so we need to find a way to simplify the complex and get some clarity in the identity of the self. Building up resilience to depend on very few stable situations may be an option for keeping up with the pace of changes ( and experiences needed to asses the right choices we make to define our identity) but it may also come at the cost of forming new traumas which are harder to heal than the ones we used to label in traditional psychology books. The ever-changing nature of humans is certainly an interesting phenomenon and is for sure something we can never quite commoditize. But can we at least try to make a bit more sense of it by not putting ourselves in the old identity boxes and start seeing the new context? I think we have much more chances of getting closer to understanding the new complex world if we stop thinking in the old paradigms.