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The Slow Erosion of Self
(10 minute read)
Key Takeaways:
- Identity is a story, not a fixed state. Who we are is not a static thing we possess but an ongoing story we construct — subject to revision, interruption, and reinterpretation across time.
- Self-examination is not optional. The unexamined life isn’t just philosophically suspect — it’s an opportunity missed. Looking honestly at ourselves, contradictions included, is where meaning is made.
- The impulse to document is ancient. Long before social media, there is one 16th century nobleman who was doing what today’s most compelling creators do — making his interior life visible to strangers. The medium might have changed, but the human need didn’t.
- Mortality clarifies. Our finiteness doesn’t have to be paralyzing — it should free us. Confronting the fact that we are not yet fully who we will become is not a source of anxiety but of urgency and possibility.
In What Would You Call It? 2, we saw how truth, though often unpleasant, is necessary and how finding meaning asks us to be brutally honest about our own self-deception. Most of us slide into comfort beliefs, and that is a choice with consequences.
We also looked at how our choices may be shaped by genetics and environment more than anything else. If true, then the whole question of free will stops being an abstract puzzle and starts to shake up assumptions we may never have thought to look at before.
The search for meaning is a modern burden. Before the Enlightenment, the philosophical focus was on how to live within roles born into. Science and secularization blew that premise wide open, leaving each generation to piece together their answers.
However, purpose might not be as mysterious as first thought — if you trace the arc of your own past, take note of those moments that made you feel closest to your ideal self, and simply do more of those things. You may find meaning has been closer than you think.
The Elephant is the Room
The pressing question for this series has been what makes life relevant for humans?
As we get older, we may look back on our lives only to realize that our sense of autonomy slowly began to fade. Moving from adolescence to adulthood, the web of life enmeshes with personal intentions and loved ones while obligations accumulate.
There are many examples — one is the process of becoming a parent. At some point it dawns on us that our job is to introduce and teach our children about life. One minute we’re admonishing them to stay away from electrical outlets and it seems the next day we’re giving them advice on dating.
In between, we teach them how to live: within and outside the family, through adolescent transitions, living away from the nest, and, finally, how to live when the nest is empty — which is really just a gentler way of saying how to prepare them for the death of a parent.
What makes life relevant is …the endpoint. Resist that urge to flinch. While we might be tempted to reject it outright by seeing it only as dwelling on the morbid — a defense mechanism — we’re not doing that here.
The subject of mortality hasn’t been lurking in the dark corner of this inquiry — it’s the room the whole conversation has been happening in.
Who’s Narrating Our Life?
The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur developed the concept of narrative identity. We understand who we are by creating a life story that links our past, present, and future into a coherent plot. This identity is not fixed; it shifts and evolves through the stories we continually tell about ourselves. Personal diaries, coming-of-age narratives, career trajectories, and family histories are all instances of how we construct these identities.
An ancient Greek thought experiment, the Ship of Theseus, illustrates Ricoeur’s theory. The mythical Greek hero Theseus returns to Athens on a 30-oar ship. The Athenians preserve it as a monument to his success. Over time, wooden planks decay and are replaced one by one. Eventually, not a single piece of the original wood remained — raising a fundamental question: was it still the same ship?
If the ship’s identity rests on its narrative — Theseus’s ship, preserved by Athenians — rather than its physical material, that is precisely Ricoeur’s point: identity is found in the narrative thread, not in the underlying physical stuff.
While our identities may not be fixed or fully self-evident, something undeniably endures — what we recognize and call Me. Like the Theseus’ ship, our understanding of Me changes and develops. Still, we maintain something that functions like a stable core of Me — one that gives us continuity and a sense of wholeness.
While retrospective narrative is not infallible — we are prone to hindsight bias — it remains far easier than trying to project an identity into an unknown future. Who you are now is the accumulated sum of everything you have lived and easier to identify. What is not clear is who you will become.
But there is one inescapable element in everyone’s future: our finite nature. As Mark Lilla notes in Ignorance and Bliss, a nonchalant treating of this renders us willingly ignorant — mortality is one domain we all actively choose to avoid.
It is here that we’ll turn our sights onto a 16th-century French nobleman and politician, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Maybe he can shed some light.
Have You Lived Your 15 Minutes Yet?
Given our times, Montaigne is a fascinating study. Andy Warhol is credited for coining the phrase, In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes, despite his denial of having said it. In the look-at-me world we are living in the sentiment seems truer than ever.
We might have Montaigne to thank.
By writing about his private thoughts, Montaigne is credited with pioneering the modern personal essay. Unlike Marcus Aurelius’ private diary, Meditations, not intended for publication, Montaigne decidedly published his essays — 107 in all — for public consumption. Rather than writing in an objective academic way, his essays are filled with candor, whims, and streams of consciousness about his personal life, all front and center.
Perhaps if he were of this generation, he would have found a natural home on social media. The impulse that drove him — documenting personal thoughts, confessing contradictions, inviting strangers into his interior life — is the same one that drives today’s content creators. The difference now is scale and speed. What took Montaigne a lifetime now unfolds in real time, across platforms, for millions.
What makes Montaigne’s essays so unique is the sheer volume and the style in which they are written. Writing about oneself is one thing; writing in a way that makes the reader feel they are looking in a mirror is entirely another. What is compelling is his personal display of humanity, which turns out to be a reflection of ours. His insight has made him a favorite for centuries.
While past and contemporary writers recorded historical events and monumental achievements, Montaigne is in a different genre altogether. As Sarah Bakewell notes in How To Live – Or A Life of Montaigne, he lived through a religious civil war and was a member of a generation robbed of hopeful idealism enjoyed by his father’s contemporaries.
Sound familiar?
While others wrote about those events, Montaigne turned away from the collective miseries of the day and instead focused his attention inward. He wrote over a thousand pages that read like a free-flowing open journal about whatever was going through his head and capturing states of mind as they happened.
He willingly exposed his flaws, peccadilloes, routines, self-doubts, and the hypocrisies of life into an honest self-portrait. He was also fascinated by the internal lives of others, incorporating many of his first-hand accounts with them.
He was convinced chaque homme porte la forme entière de l’humaine condition — every man bears the whole form of the human condition. Montaigne’s gender exclusivity aside, humans may have a different makeup (family, career, culture, and achievements), but maintain the same fundamental psychological and emotional needs (to feel happy, secure, and fulfilled beyond Maslow’s basic needs).
His writing meanders at times, but purposefully so — he tackled questions about life including friendship, customs, names, diversions, and experiences. He also tackled topics of great interest like cannibals, why we laugh and cry at the same time, thumbs, cruelty, and how our mind hinders us. All written with the underlying tone, how to live, which gained intensity shortly after his brush with mortality.
Like many in his generation, Montaigne saw death everywhere. In his 20s he studied the Stoics and their fundamental acceptance of death impressed him. In his 30s, death finally seemed to be encircling him as he lost loved ones; closest friend to the plague, father with kidney complications, a younger brother in a freak accident, and first child lived only eight weeks. Eventually, he lost four of six children.* Only one survived into adulthood.
While some might be hardened by death, Montaigne grew even more fearful.
They heightened after a servant’s horse careened into Montaigne and his horse, throwing both to the ground. He lay lifeless, his servants trying to revive him. They took him back to the castle where he went in and out of consciousness. For several days he was in excruciating pain, convinced he was dying.
But he didn’t, and during those days of recovery he began noting his internal reactions to what he thought was to be his imminent demise.
Later he wrote of the experience, …it seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips and credited the event for showing him how to live. Indeed, his essay, Q. How to live? A. Don’t worry about death., is one of his most enduring answers to his query. As evidence, he described his near-death experience as surprisingly gentle and sweet.
If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry: Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.
Now, meaning for the Socratic provocation to philosophise is to learn to die was different. He would live his experiences not for what they were supposed to be, or as philosophical lessons to learn, but for the way he actually felt while experiencing them. His writings reflected his personal Me and now both were an open book.
Life was far from idyllic, but he had a renewed sense of self and priorities afterwards. Once he was well enough, he withdrew from public office and moved to a chateau in southern France where he amassed a library of more than 1,500 books, spending the rest of his life studying, writing, and leisure.
In his quest to learn how to live instead of how he should live, Montaigne models for us how to accept our own finitude without it having to be a morbid exercise. Instead, fear is replaced with urgency — our limited time is precious — focus on what really matters.
The questions this series has circled — narrating our lives, how we live our fifteen minutes, what stories we inherit and which we choose — are not rhetorical. They are the work. Ricoeur was right: looking back we can get a glimpse of who we will become. Montaigne was equally right: the examined life, the one we bother to look at honestly, is already a more meaningful one.
In Part 4, we’ll turn from the question of identity to the question of legacy — not what we leave behind, but what we are still building while we are here.
*Sources vary on the number of children.
Additional Sources:
- Bakewell, Sarah, How To Live Or A Life Of Montaigne, 2010
- Bierlein, JF, Living Myths: How Myth Gives Meaning To Human Experience, 1999
- Zweig, Stefan, Montaigne, as translated by Will Stone, 2015
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