In our obsession with finding ourselves, we’ve lost sight of who we are.
Fragmented individualism is a cultural k-hole. You feel like you’re deep into something but you’re disassociated from the context that gives it meaning.
Throughout most of human history, community has provided that context.
Being part of many communities is a fairly new phenomenon. We enjoy the freedom and expansion and experimentation that comes with not being locked into the village we were born into.
But we’ve moved so far from the collective in pursuit of individual identity, we don’t have enough weight to anchor ourselves.
We are also pitted against each other. Battling to earn from the same creator programs, battling to be earliest or funniest or hottest, battling for the attention of the gatekeepers to whatever new part of our identity we’re chasing.
The prize is survival. We tell ourselves it’s belonging.
We are unwilling to step “backward” into working with others. It feels dangerous. And we continue to search for what’s missing by ourselves, which guarantees never finding it.
Collective individualism
Where fragmented individualism is a set of fragile, isolated versions of ourselves, collective individualism is where we fully understand and express each version through a set of communities.
Gen Alpha already understands collective individualism through gaming.
When you socialise via a feed, you are performing for an audience. There are too many rules and risks to be truly vulnerable. Through an alt (a pseudonymous account), you can be bolder, but your identity is a one-way interaction, no one knows it’s you.
In an open world game, you can socialise as the person your friends know, and explore new parts of yourself through a character. The character makes it safe to experiment and grow in front of your friends. Your friends get to recognise, celebrate and reflect that growth as you all work towards a common goal.
You aren’t a hive mind or even a team, you are co-conspirators: you come together for the main campaign while still conducting your own side-quests.
Collective individualism puts other people in the mirror. You see yourself alone and within the collective. Your own individual self and your participation in something greater is reflected back at you.
Your identity now has an anchor.
Playing a system vs creating a system
Rather than a shallow scattering of self, fragmentation is often misdirected depth. You go after an identity because you believe it will make you more cool or more desirable or more successful.
It feels productive because you’ve been sold that it’s productive but it’s detached from who YOU are and you feel that lack of anchor without understanding what it actually is.
So you try harder to become an insider and to feel like ‘yourself’ without realising you haven’t chosen the right community or the real you.
When I had my fashion brand, I bounced between London and Paris and New York, forever trying to win the approval of the British fashion council and the press and the stockists that I thought would solve everything. I watched myself get it all and felt nothing. I was still an outsider, burned out and lonely.
Then I started working with local artists. They’d pull their cool friends into our shoots, which were a whirlwind of energy. Some were emerging musicians we’d style for shows and festivals. We made music videos. We made fashion for video games.
Everyone was working towards this collective come-up, while still serving their individual goals and it finally felt real. I finally felt real. And by turning my back on status, opportunities (and real status) flowed in.
The difference between playing a system and creating a new one.
Conditions for self actualisation
Often in our quest for self actualisation we remove ourself from the context needed to self actualise. Your uniqueness has more weight in a collective, even if it’s a three-person groupchat.
For a community to show you yourself, it needs to meet certain criteria:
You contribute towards a collective goal, and have that contribution recognised. The community is measurably better with you in it.
The collective goal aligns with your individual goal. You assume roles that suit your unique talents and world view.
Even if it’s all conversation and no tangible “build”, that conversation contributes to everyone’s learning and development. The group is collectively inspired by what’s being discussed.
Our plural selves
No one is just one thing and most of us believe we are more things than we actually are (I’m sure I could be a skateboarder if I ever got around to learning).
We are too self aware for one role in one community to be fulfilling. The village can’t exist in the way it did. The desire to be more is evolution, agency, a good thing. We just need better conditions.
The difference between fragmented and plural selves is quality of participation. For most of us that means integrating more deeply into fewer, richer communities, with a real answer to:
What am I building with others that I couldn’t build alone and how is my piece of it still independently mine?
What are the slow layers (the things that are too hard to fake, that require immersion x time) that make this community rich and meaningful?
Exiting the casino
The lure of the cultural k-hole is everywhere, fake depth masquerading as a sense of self.
You have to believe the risk of following the popular path or of chasing the Next Big Thing is greater than the risk of going all in on the wrong community.
The latter forces you to form your own conviction. In the worst case scenario you leave that community with new self-knowledge. The former means you might never have any.
The hollowness of my “success” in the fashion industry repelled me into an aligned community, who taught me that fashion wasn’t actually the right container for the building I wanted to do. I could perhaps have skipped the first part, but the second was life-changing.
Hard reset
Find ways to create empty space for yourself like your life depends on it. Get into nature if you can, do not listen to anything on your headphones, just think or write.
Write every morning before you pick up your phone.
Sit in the discomfort of not being able to think or write properly until you can and then sit in the discomfort of your thoughts to extract the next layer. You need to tap your subconscious, your instincts, that get buried deeper every day by the way we live our lives. It might take a while.
Commit until you start breaking through and then keep committing to daily writing and a fixed period of daily empty space.
Retreating is important but solo self-reflection is incomplete. Put community in the mirror. Publish your writing. Have vulnerable conversations about what you’ve learned. This will help you find the people you’re supposed to build with. These are the people who will show you who you are.
I've definitely fallen into that trap of chasing the "next big thing" just because it looked cool from the outside, only to realize I was building for an audience that didn't exist!
Also, I get your point about community. But finding that kind of grounded community as an adult outside of school or work feels next to impossible...
so well explained! I feel like there are so many options on "who you still could be" it creates some sort of paralysis in people to commit to a direction. This resonated with me as an immigrant. It's hard until you just go embrace being who you are aka creating your own space.