Identification Age: The Habit of Complicating Who We Are

We live in a time where it seems everyone is trying to find themselves. But not in the old, romanticised sense backpacking across India on a shoestring budget. No, the modern search for self is much more formal, more anxious, more clinical. It has become an exercise in identification.

Today, we define ourselves by diagnosis, by category, by theory. We aren’t just people anymore, we are trauma survivors, neurodivergents, gender non-conforming, ADHD, ASD, PTSD, HSP as well as spiritually awake and identifying with the higher self. And it’s not that any of these categories are inherently wrong or harmful. Quite the opposite: many have emerged from the human need to feel seen after decades of invisibility. But that’s just it: we are not seen. Not by others, but more often than not not by ourselves either.

So instead, we identify.

We latch on to the names, the frameworks, the roles that promise recognition. Our identities resemble documentation more than discovery. We learn the language, the symptoms, the “science”. But for all this identifying, most people seem more lost than ever.

Identification is not Our Identity

I don’t say this as an outsider. I’ve lived in these worlds. I got lost for years in the trauma world, self-healing spaces, and endless spirals of self-assessment and self-fixing. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of “what’s wrong with me” hoping to find the door that led to “who I am.”

But that door rarely opens.

Instead, I kept finding theories. Models. Modalities. Language that grew more and more abstract, until it no longer resembled life. You want to heal? Learn the jargon. Memorise the acronyms. Talk to a therapist and see if they validate your inner child or correct your attachment style. Just make sure you never go off-script.

This is what identification looks like now. It’s all theory. It’s all head.

Intellectualisation of life

And it starts early. Children are pulled into academic systems before they even understand how to perceive the world. They’re taught to analyse before they’ve had the chance to experience. We’ve built a world where thinking precedes being. We make them intellectual long before they’ve learned to feel.

Worse still, the system doesn’t account for how children actually develop. It doesn’t bend to the wide, unpredictable arcs of human growth. It narrows everything to a standard timeline: rough sketches of what a “normal” child should be able to do, and when. But development isn’t standard. It’s staggered, genetic and individual. Some children simply aren’t ready to learn what they’re told to learn. Others may never learn that way at all. And it’s often those children who fall through the cracks. The children who get diagnosed, labelled, or left behind, when really, they just needed a different rhythm and the space to explore their own unique gifts and be helped to know who they are.

And then we wonder why adults are lost. Why they chase theories like it’s theories that build our reality.

Creating identities

What does a person do when they no longer know who they are? When their work is hollow, their relationships seem scheduled, and their education has taught them how to analyse everything except themselves?

They compensate. With borrowed identity.

We create identities to explain our suffering, to legitimise our confusion. And again: this is human. But it’s not healing. It’s not coming home.

We have trauma identity. Clinical identity. Sexual and gender identities. Neurodivergent identity. Intellectual identity. We define ourselves by what we’ve been through, by what we struggle with, by the language someone once gave us for the pain we didn’t know how to name.

All this complexity unfolds as traditional ideas of man and woman are being challenged. While racial and background identities remain highly charged and deeply unresolved. We’re adding more and more complexity—layer upon layer—without addressing the core ache beneath it all.

We don’t feel who we are. So we name ourselves instead.

Spiritual bypassing

Even in the spiritual world, identification sneaks in through the back door.

Maybe you’ve seen it too — the deidentified ones. The Michael Singers of the world who speak of 'not being the mind,' of 'being the watcher,' of letting go of identity entirely. In theory, they’re right. But they miss something crucial: you cannot deidentify from a self you’ve never fully met. And you won’t find the way back if no one explains why you’re stuck.

Their teachings bypass the body, the emotions, the history, the language of the soul. They bypass. And so we create another identity: the spiritually awake person who’s “moved beyond it all.” Detached. Serene. Floating above the chaos of life, but never actually in it.

But we don’t need more performance. We don’t need more identities, spiritual or otherwise. We need truth. We need us.

Head vs heart

The more educated a person is, the more likely they are to be stuck in the head. I say this without spite. But look closely and you’ll see: so many intellectuals are walking storms of confusion, doubt, and anxiety. They live in concepts, in bubbles, in theories. The world has become a set of frameworks to interpret rather than a place to be in.

This, I believe, is part of what we call mental illness. The mind has been trained to loop on itself. It has no grounding. No silence. No embodiment. No heart.

Unintellectual people, oddly enough, often suffer less. They still are rarely free of identification, many are still trapped in political or cultural narratives, but they don’t carry the same kind of existential fragmentation that happens in the head. They haven’t been taught to dissect life before they’ve lived it.

From more to less

I’m not offering solutions. Only observations.

What I see is a society of disconnected people living in branded realities. Unable to speak across difference. Unable to sit with not-knowing. Obsessed with defining themselves, but terrified to see themselves.

We used to have religion, and for better or worse, it gave us a structure. But we’ve replaced it with information—endless information—and abstracted ourselves into oblivion.

We don’t know who we are. And we don’t know how to find out.

Even the way back has become packaged. Meditation, once a simple return to the breath, a moment to sit and be, is now an app, a subscription, a playlist of soothing voices telling us what to feel and where to go in our minds. The one thing that used to help us escape the jungle is now part of the jungle. Another guided experience, another narrative, another idea of peace.

We’re still trying to fix the noise with more noise. To solve ourselves with more layers of unauthentic selves.

But healing, if it even means anything, might be far quieter than that. It might look like walking away from the ideas for a while. Like turning down the volume of the world and rediscoverying the simplicity of it all. Letting go of who we think we are, and sitting long enough to feel the truth we have been feeling all along. Not insight. Not diagnosis. Just stillness. Just the simplicity of being. Space. The kind we used to reach for in silence, without headphones. And the thing that we once found on our hike through India and Nepal.

A vision

Every person plays roles. Every profession comes with a bit of a costume. We all perform, to some degree. Identity does matter. So do theories. There is no way we could heal with the ideas other people produce so we can cherry-pick what we need to recognise us.

But what matters more is whether we remember the part of us that isn’t playing.

Whether we remember the heart.

The heart doesn’t speak in categories. It doesn’t require a diagnosis. It doesn’t care about jargon. It remembers your dreams. It remembers who you were before someone told you what to be. It remembers you.

And if you want to find your way home, it won’t be your identity that guides you. It’s the pulse underneath it all, yet impossible to hear if we keep listening to the chatter in our heads.