Belly Button Lint

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Tag: identity

  • Theme:

    unconscious drives

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    1–2 minutes

    How do you know what to fight against until it appears and is defined?

    The isolated tribe cannot defend against the capitalist hegemonic state until it grasps the model of destabilization and desire introduced from the contact. (How could you imagine this in advance?)

    While you can target all outsiders (strangers) as enemies in preemptive defense, the more subversive model is a subliminal natural desire.

    For instance: The oedipal complex names your unconscious desires, allowing you to defend and socialize against them.

  • Theme:

    ambivalence at the end

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    1–2 minutes

    At the end one can rage or approach the inevitable with a clarity that appears as ambivalence.
    It is not ambivalence or complacency but wisdom: dignity and grace in the face of the inevitable.

  • Theme:

    Indispensable you

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    1–2 minutes

    You are replaceable, but quality diminishes.

  • Theme:

    Acheivement through negation

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    1–2 minutes

    To achieve your potential, we assume that you add actions, but more often the hardship is in destroying the limits preventing you from attaining your peak self.

    These can be external resistance or internal demons you overcome. Once sloth, gluttony, or procrastination are removed, the achievement is foregone.

  • Theme:

    familiarity breeds contempt

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    1–2 minutes

    It bears repetition: our familiarity provides a depth of understanding that allows us to despise something/someone in nuanced detail, while our ignorance only allows an abstract vague revulsion.

    The more you understand, the more alike you are.
    The more alike you are, the more your contempt for them acts as a mirror, reflecting your self-contempt.

  • Theme:

    Purchasing Identity

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    1–2 minutes

    We are admonished to “Find yourself, find your purpose, and be authentic.”
    In a consumer society, ready-made identities are easy to adopt but come at a higher overall cost.

    While it seems harmful, if not impossible, to deprogram yourself completely from societal norms and identity, any attempt to desist consumptive gluttony is laudable because it provides a space to allow your natural desires to displace mimetic striving.

    related idea: perhaps the “authentic you” is an impossible dream and an excellent marketing ploy?

  • Theme:

    Double Cowboy

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    1–2 minutes

    At the airport, I saw a man wearing two cowboy hats stacked on each other.
    Obviously, this was for safe transportation, but it begs the question:

    Does wearing two cowboy hats make you doubly cowboy or completely clown?
    Does doubling down create a double negative: the inversion of intent?

    In doubling down on identity markers, you move into the realm of affectation, pure aesthetics and costume, which denies authenticity. At such a point, overt self-awareness becomes excess and emerges as a parody.

  • Theme:

    Mirroring conversations into identity

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    1–2 minutes

    We mirror conversations in our head: we take in what is said and replay it (like an infinite mirror) to give ourselves an image.

    In repeatedly gazing (incessantly) at the "self-made-of-words," we begin to believe the illusion when it is only a momentary fragment of a possible you.

    Our reflection is not who we are but who we have allowed ourselves to become.

  • Theme:

    Productive you, desiring you

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    1–2 minutes

    The more you see yourself as productive, i.e., someone who accomplishes your desires, the more "you" becomes an act of capturing outcomes.

    This is because actions for purpose become utility, and utility is a trait of objects: to pride yourself on your "use" ahead of your "self" is to subjugate your value to production.

    Similarly, equating your identity with desire (and its fulfillment) is to relate to all things as gratification or blockage; reductionist othering converts everything into objects and acts.

  • Theme:

    The law of form

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    1–2 minutes

    The form is subject to the law (a set of agreed restrictions), which determines its shape and reactions.
    To identify with the form (the shape) is to become bound to its laws.
    In being "you," you bind yourself to consistency: a form of "you" with a set of laws.

    Yet the world is a process of change, and to become the form is to calcify the self and cease being aware of the world, lest it disrupts your formation.