On Identity: Exiting The Costume Ball

Wed Aug 20 2025

Identity

Identity is not something you are. It is something you do.

Everyday I’m Shuffling

Most people talk about identity as if it were fixed: a role, a label, a set of traits. Something you “have.”

But identity isn’t static. It isn’t a possession. It isn’t a single mask.

Identity is enacted. It’s the way you shift and adapt, moment to moment, context to context. Identity is something you actively do.

At work, one version of you runs. At home, another. With old friends, another. These shifts are seamless. You don’t even think about them. They’re natural. They’re necessary. They also share the same core, it’s not like you’re 100 different people…you’re one thing, but you adapt dynamically.

That’s not the problem.

The problem comes when one of those versions of you is running on a belief system that your deeper self can’t tolerate.

Imagine growing up in a strict religion. You learn the rules, you perform them, you wear the mask. Outwardly it works. But inside, something burns. Every sermon, every commandment, every “you must…” grinds against what you know in your bones.

That inner friction costs energy. You force yourself to play along, but it takes more and more to hold the mask in place. The strain leaks out as exhaustion, depression, collapse. Eventually you break. Not because you are weak, but because the system(s) you’re running is fundamentally incompatible with who you really are.

The Core

At the base of identity is the core self.

This is not a role, not a belief, not a story. It’s the raw, unconditioned awareness of being alive. It’s what existed before language, before indoctrination, before anyone told you who you were supposed to be.

You felt it as a child, before the world started writing on you. You still feel it in flashes, in silence, in awe, in love, in collapse. You can’t pin it down with words, because the moment you try to define it, it slips away. But it’s there. And it’s the one part of you that doesn’t fracture.

The Conditioning

Around the core sits the conditioning layer.

This is the accumulation: family scripts, cultural myths, religious codes, school rules, media loops, traumas, rewards. Every “you are…” that ever landed on you and stuck.

Conditioning isn’t bad in itself. Without it, you’d have no language, no way to coordinate. But conditioning can also be hijacked. Systems of influence (education, media, politics) know this. They don’t target your core. They target your overlays.

And that’s where identity starts to blur: are you doing your own identity, or someone else’s?

The Lenses

On top of this sits the operating layer, not one self, but many lenses.

Work-self. Parent-self. Friend-self. Lover-self. Each one draws from a different rulebook.

This shifting is normal. It’s what keeps you sane in different contexts. You don’t behave at a funeral the way you behave at a barbecue. You don’t talk to your boss the way you talk to your child. The lenses make identity flexible.

This is identity in motion: something you do.

The danger is forgetting these lenses are situational.

Believing any one of them is the whole of who you are. That’s how people get trapped in roles, suffocating under the illusion that the mask is the face.

The Belief System Overlays (BSOs)

Every lens runs on a belief system overlay (BSO), a subscribed framework of values and rules. Some inherited. All eventually consciously chosen.

The work-lens runs on the corporate BSO. The church-lens runs on a religious BSO (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc.). The family-lens runs on the cultural BSO (society’s unspoken rules, your actual localised heritage and upbringing, etc.).

Usually, this works fine. The lenses swap in and out. Each runs on its overlay. Life keeps moving.

But when a BSO is deeply misaligned with your core, everything changes.

Misalignment

If a lens is running on an overlay that corrodes the core, it bleeds energy. It takes more and more effort to keep the act alive. The lens starts sending warning signals inward:

“This doesn’t fit. I can’t keep this up.”

You feel it as anxiety. Exhaustion. Depression. Burnout. Collapse.

This is not personal weakness. It is identity under strain. The core is intact, but the overlay is unsustainable. If you mistake yourself for the overlay, you’ll believe the collapse means you are broken.

In truth, what’s breaking is the borrowed system you’ve been forced to run in order to survive.

Case Study: Nature vs. Capitalism

Imagine a core that is aligned to nature.

It thrives on simplicity, harmony, self-sufficiency, balance with the environment. That is its truth: a way of living that feels right, that doesn’t drain, that sustains both the self and the world around it.

Now place that person in a capitalist system.

Survival demands a lens that can run on the overlay of consumerism. You need a job. You need money. You need to compete, produce, buy, consume. So a WORK-Lens comes online. It subscribes to the capitalist BSO because without it you cannot pay rent, buy food, or protect your family.

On the surface, this works. Bills get paid. Groceries are bought. Outwardly, you’re “functioning.”

But inside, the strain is enormous. The Core rejects the overlay. It knows in its bones that this system is extractive, corrosive, hostile to the very harmony it values. To keep the work lens running, you burn energy every day. Suppressing the part of you that longs for balance. Pretending that endless consumption is normal.

Over time, the signals begin. Exhaustion. Alienation. Depression. Anxiety. That gnawing sense that life is meaningless, no matter how much you earn or buy.

This isn’t personal weakness. It’s structural misalignment. The Core is not broken, it is just forced to run a belief system that is not compatible, so it complains.

And the impact is not only individual. Multiply this mismatch across millions of people and you get mass burnout, mental health epidemics, ecological destruction, societies chasing growth while their foundations rot. What looks like “progress” on the surface is in fact a vast haemorrhaging of Core energy at scale.

This is what happens when survival demands that Lenses subscribe to a framework fundamentally opposed to the Core.

Collapse isn’t an accident. It’s inevitable.

The Decision Engine

Lenses don’t choose their overlays. They just run them. So where does the choice happen? What decides which belief system you subscribe to?

It isn’t the Core. The Core doesn’t trade in systems or constructs. It simply is. It isn’t the lens either. The lens is adaptive, it executes whatever overlay it’s tethered to.

Somewhere between conditioning and operating, there is a Decision Engine. It takes in the conditioning you’ve absorbed, the rewards you’ve been trained to chase, the fears you’ve learned to avoid and from there it decides which overlays you sign onto.

For most people, this happens unconsciously. The Decision Engine just rubber-stamps whatever the environment demands. Family religion? Subscribed. National myth? Subscribed. Corporate dogma? Subscribed.

But the Decision Engine can wake up. It can pause, question, discriminate. It can say: this overlay is useful for survival, but I won’t confuse it with who I am. That one corrodes my core, so I refuse it.

This is the critical pivot. The Core doesn’t get to choose. The Conditioning doesn’t care. The Lenses just execute. The Decision Engine is where the act of freedom begins.

And once again: identity is something you do.

Coherence

A fractured identity confuses the layers. It mistakes conditioning for the core. It clings to a lens as if it were the whole. It fuses with a belief system even as it corrodes the self.

A coherent identity does something else. It roots in the core and sees the conditioning for what it is. It holds lenses lightly, as tools not prisons. It treats overlays as subscriptions, not absolutes and it listens when misalignment drains the system. Offending subscriptions are cancelled, core is better aligned and identity harmony is restored.

That’s coherence.

And coherence is itself an action: a way of doing identity that aligns the layers instead of fracturing them.

Why Identity Matters

Identity is not a possession. It is not a single mask. It is not a label that can capture the whole.

Identity is something you do.

Every moment, every context, every relationship, you are enacting it, shifting lenses, running overlays, negotiating between conditioning and core. Sometimes aligned, sometimes fractured.

If you do it unconsciously, you’ll live someone else’s scripts, exhaust yourself in borrowed systems, collapse under the weight of misalignment. If you do it consciously, you become coherent. And coherence is contagious. It ripples outward into every relationship, every community.

A fractured identity leaks chaos. A coherent identity generates trust.

And trust is the only ground anything real can be built on.