Everyone Says "Be Yourself." So How Do Young People Today Decide Who They Are? | QDaily Research Lab

Labeling and sorting themselves, changing how they look to feel they have achieved something, quantifying themselves, and shutting themselves inside an echo chamber.

"Be yourself."

Say you wake up one day seized by the sudden crisis of "what is the point of living like this," and you go online, full of anxiety, to search for an answer. (You have picked up this fine habit: whenever you run into a problem, your first instinct is to search for the answer online, as if every problem you will ever meet in life has already been answered for you by somebody else.) And you always hear the same reply — "be yourself."

In an age that prizes craftsmanship, you hear that line a hundred times a year, until it leaves you with the ultimate question: who exactly is "myself"?

To find where you are in the world, you usually need two things: a fixed map, and your position on it. What is suspicious about slogans like "be your true self" is that they already assume a "self" is hiding somewhere inside you, and that the "right path" will lead you to it. Once found, everything is settled — you have completed the great ritual of "becoming yourself," and from then on you only have to "listen to your inner voice" and do as it says.

But you have probably noticed that the self was never a fixed thing. From the moment you were born you have been taught, influenced and shaped every minute of every day, to say nothing of all the accidents a life contains. The map is not fixed, and neither is you-on-the-map.

In the past, contact between people was limited, and comparisons between individuals settled around the average. A single class had one or two top students and one or two beauties. Online, people run into enormous numbers of good-looking, funny, widely read people all the time. Unlike socializing in the real world, which is bounded by geography, the internet connects people one to another while also concentrating the right to speak in fewer and fewer hands. These influencers and bloggers, lit up by the spotlight, have become the new frame of reference; even fictional characters, such as the ones in the dating game Mr Love: Queen's Choice, are turning into a standard. Switch on the screen and it is all handsome men, beautiful women and comedians; switch it off and you see your own large face reflected in the black glass. That enormous gap leaves modern people with a generally low sense of well-being. The world is wonderful; you are still bursting with gloom.

People notice quickly how far they fall short of the standard, and, having sunk into collective anxiety, they find themselves an escape hatch: self-mockery. Lower your own estimate of yourself and you lower what others expect of you — defensive pessimism as a cure for a crisis of identity. "Life is already this hard and I am already this pathetic. Do you really have the heart to criticize me?"

At the same time, because the frame of reference is now set so high, people have also turned more perfectionist. Whether they are retouching their photographs or drawing up New Year's resolutions, they demand more of themselves and of others than before (which produces fresh anxiety when the demands are not met), exaggerating their own flaws while growing more narcissistic.

The world changes fast now, and so does the relationship between "me" and the world. Just as popular as "be yourself" are "losing yourself" and all the adjectives attached to being lost. Feeling lost is in fact an emotion every generation of young people is bound to have. To be exact, it is not confined to the young either; some people grow up and announce that they are no longer confused only because they have stopped thinking, because they no longer want to. Read generously, being lost could just as well be called thinking.

The point that matters most is this: holding down the anxiety that "who am I" produces, searching for and revising your reference points again and again, thinking again and again about the thing called "the self" from the inside and from the outside — that process is itself a way of moving forward.

On that basis, the QDaily Research Lab ran a survey and drew up eight observations on how people today decide "who I am."

1. Looking for a sense of belonging — using the group to locate the self

"Same here, same here." "Is it just me who feels this way?" For every person looking online for difference, there is another looking for agreement.

When you get sorted into "Virgo," INTJ, or Team Salty,

"I" become distinguishable from people in the other camps, while people in my own camp can understand me. This need to be "different from everyone else" and yet have "others just like me" has produced a whole set of stock phrases online for finding your own kind, of the "is it just me who feels this way?" variety.

"We are essentially members of a community, and it is precisely within a community that we learn how to become an individual." That is Heidegger. Human beings, being social, usually place themselves in some particular group in order to gain a connection with other people, and use that connection to confirm who they are.

Astrology and fortune-telling never go out of fashion, which shows how badly we want to be understood. When someone can state something that fits my own situation — however vaguely — "I" have been represented.

The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman took this a step further: the reliable markers of group identity are gradually being replaced by fluidity, instability and individualism. People used to mark themselves out by religion, family or employer. People today do not need a group any less — they need one that is far more finely divided.

If someone writes an article saying that "earthlings" have such and such a trait, hardly anyone answers. Replace "earthlings" with "empty-nest youth," "Buddha-style youth," "dejected youth," and you will see plenty of people with their hands up shouting "that's me, that's me." Replace those later with "wisecracking youth," "heart-attack youth," "busy-but-useless youth," and the same thing happens. As long as you find a trait some "earthlings" genuinely share and wrap it in a fashionable word, the group acquires a personality, becomes entertaining, becomes a commodity: this brand expresses the character I have (or want), so I will buy what this brand is selling. I am defined by "what car I drive, what clothes I wear, what perfume I spray on, what music I listen to, which group I belong to."

By now, do you see roughly why personality tests are basically never all that far off?

2. Labeling yourself with one hand, refusing labels with the other

As a rule, people hate being labeled but like labeling themselves — or do it without noticing.

• "You can tell at a glance she's a woman driver"
• "Born in the 1950s and still dating?"
• "Your logic is such a mess, you must be a liberal-arts student"

Labels of gender, age and field of study are resented not because people dislike "woman driver," "born in the 1950s" or "liberal-arts student," but because each one carries something behind it: "women just can't drive," "people born in the 1950s should stop messing about," "you can't reason with a liberal-arts student." People do not want to be judged through a label.

And though people like to shout "I do as I please, why would I force a persona on myself," under cover of the internet they usually give themselves one anyway.

The labels young people like to pin on themselves tend to be "bad student," "chronically lazy," "procrastinator," "can't get out of bed" — mocking themselves with flaws that are not serious. Or "looks-obsessed," "foodie," "OCD," "minimalist" — praising themselves with down-to-earth tastes and temperaments.

Socializing is itself a stage, and everyone plays a part of their own in front of other people. People use certain tactics to dress up their image, and so to shape what others think of them.

The "labeled personality" is one such tactic — a persona, in other words. Idol stars are at bottom a form of personality consumption: to most people, Leslie Cheung, Bruce Lee, Sima Yi, Sun Yat-sen and Xue Zhiqian are each just a few labels. Now that social networks have arrived, everyone has the chance to display themselves to others, and the more a person gains from social networks, the more carefully they manage the impression they make. You can see it in the fact that what a person posts on WeChat Moments or Weibo is usually all of one type.

What they post is sometimes a world away from who they actually are. But as the philosopher William James held, "a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him." To everyone who will never see what he is actually like, the labeled persona is the man himself.

3. Working out

Going to the gym has become something close to politically correct.

In an age of ever-shorter attention spans, people want instant feedback and results they can see at a glance. Outward beauty becomes the most direct evidence of both.

Look at dating apps: two or three photographs are enough to decide whether you want to know someone. The first thing you do with a newly added friend is go and look at the photographs in their Moments. Mainstream social taste — the standard set by the middle class and the fashion industry, passed to young people more directly than ever through social networks, by way of what the KOLs display — also demands a beautiful exterior as the platform on which an inner self can be shown.

Foucault treated "technologies of the self" as a way of "shaping the subject": technologies of the self "permit individuals to effect, by their own means or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality." Working out is exactly that kind of transformation. When people post "before and after" photographs, it is as though they have completed a ritual and been born again. A strong body once suggested a manual labourer; today working out gets tied to "willpower, plenty of spare time, good self-management."

The meaning attached to the gym gives people the feeling that they are changing for the better, and paying frequent attention to your own body is also a way of confirming yourself, frequently.

4. Filter culture: which self are you after?

This pursuit of outward beauty also shows in filter culture. Retouching and filters have become a kind of new social etiquette, and people feel deeply insecure about their unfiltered, bare-faced selves.

Japan's buzzword of 2017 was "insta-worthy" — the Instagram-style disguise that lets people build an "ideal self" online. Girls who cannot swim go to a night-time pool to take photographs; people with no friends rent friends to pose beside. Behind such a disguise, people get to meet others as a different "me."

People on social networks seem to be travelling, staying in expensive hotels and eating lavish meals every day, and your own unremarkable life, unsifted and unimproved, seems not worth mentioning by comparison. The "I" of filter culture becomes a creative, performing "I." Eating noodles, putting on makeup, taking a selfie, walking in the park — it is like an actor preparing in the wings: choose the angle, compose the shot, take the picture, add the filter, write the caption, until the work is uploaded and a performance is complete. Life becomes raw material; life is secondary; "I" am confirmed by the audience's response.

Which means that "I" will improve my future photographs — the next "I," that is — according to how many likes I get and how kind or unkind the comments are. Under those conditions, what "I" turn into is largely decided by that jury.

5. Becoming a quantified young person

The "quantified self" was first proposed in 2007 by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly of the American magazine Wired; the core of it is "self-knowledge through self-tracking."

Technology develops so fast that the future grows more uncertain and arrives sooner than ever, and anyone who cannot update themselves in time soon falls into the anxiety of being left behind. People who cannot get a grip on the future hope to get a more accurate grip on themselves: gene tests, health apps, GTD software, year-end reports on your music, films and spending. The chase after efficiency makes people readier to rely on data to understand themselves. How many millilitres of water did I drink today, how many calories did I take in, how many pages did I read, how many hours did I sleep — mature technology has made this kind of tracking and counting possible, and very convenient too.

The question then becomes who sets the numbers. Once every side of a person can be quantified, he will push those numbers towards an "optimum value" and become a "healthy person," disciplined by society and by science.

That quantified discipline also shows in a dependence on rating systems — "richest man, number one, top 30, top 250." Beyond the reliance on rankings, when people discuss a film, a dish, a piece of music or someone's looks, verdicts of the "he's about an 8" kind are common too. The quantified young person's respect for and trust in standards leaves him impatient to look up who came first; his attention is pulled to the top of the list, and he absorbs, without meaning to, the taste of whoever made it.

6. I need to learn

A study by the Swiss scholar Krasnova found that many people feel "let down and exhausted" after using Facebook, and that the biggest reason is envy. The internet sharpens the sense of competition, and under that habit of comparison, "people find it harder and harder to accept that they have not grown, in the worldly sense, within a given stretch of time." And most people now agree that "learning" is the best route to growth.

But learning takes a long time and a lot of experience before it shows results, and the habit of instant feedback that merchants, the internet and games have spoiled us with cannot wait that long. So people watch online business courses and social commentary, and learn "knowledge" with no strong bearing on their own lives in order to take the edge off the anxiety — even if, having listened to "10 steps to learning English efficiently," they never get past step three. Manufacturing the illusion of "I am learning, I am improving" matters more than the learning; the gesture outweighs the thing. Hence the boom in paid knowledge products and quiz games.

The result is that nothing settles. Knowledge reduced to snippets of information turns people into fast-forgetting knowers, and what is always most popular is "the 10-minute trick that will serve you for life."

7. "What I want to say about this is…"

Now that everyone can speak and everyone is their own media outlet, the line between ordinary people and authorities has broken down. The result is fake news flying in all directions and emotions amplified, with remarks of the "I don't approve of online mob violence, but Liu Xin is the exception" sort everywhere. Authority, which requires rigorous logical verification, usually does not point anywhere precise. KOLs and influencers who trade in emotion lead the way, netizens play moral tribunal, and the "moral flaws" of public figures are easily magnified online and never let go.

The part an individual plays in this is to comment and to pick a side. An opinion is ratified by shares and likes; the more shares and likes an opinion gets, the more people see it, which in turn brings more shares and likes, until one or a few mainstream opinions have formed.

One phenomenon is that comments count for more and more, to the point that some people rate them above the article itself. Reading no further than the headline and scrolling straight to the comments, or commenting before finishing, is common. A large part of the reason is that comments are short and take a clear side. In fact we never merely live through our lives; we are always narrating and re-narrating the experience as we have it, and that narration contains our immediate attitude towards life. The appetite for an attitude — a verdict — is stronger than the appetite for the experience. Hence the standing questions: "what do you make of XXX" and "what is it like to experience XXX."

There is one more trend worth watching 👇:

8. Your own "echo chamber"

People hand part of their power over to tools: which songs to hear, which films to watch, which articles to read, all left to "recommended for you." The sources of information grow alike, and preference algorithms mean the feeds push only what the reader is willing to click. On social networks, people will accept only opinions close to their own. Those similar voices repeat and reinforce one another, sometimes in distorted forms, until most people inside that environment take the distorted story for the whole of the truth. As for the friends and fellow netizens whose "values don't match," people today, being practical, are less willing than ever to explain themselves; they block, delete and mute, and that is that.

One problem with this is that "much of what we think we want is only what other people want us to want." And a guess at "what I like" can also be read as "what most people will probably like." That is why a population that looks diverse keeps growing more alike inside each of its small circles.

Illustrations: Lin Xiaoyao