Every identity you create for yourself will eventually break down. Your body and mind will inevitably fail you and whatever identity you created will cease to exist. Maybe the Buddhists got it right.
It's very hard to overstate the profundity of Buddhism. The author embarked in self-reflection journey with this article, and I think had he kept going he would have bumped into Buddhist teachings.
Suffering is the foundation of experience. The author could not have arrived at his conclusions without suffering through what he did first. It's a contradiction like many Buddhist teachings. By embracing suffering, you somehow avoid it.
Apologies for a comment all over the place but you triggered the philosopher in me. :)
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Buddhism can very easily be made an analogy with programming and book writing:
"You have the perfect program not when you cannot add anything more to it but when you cannot take anything more away from it."
Their core philosophy basically is: let go, don't hold on to things, don't pile things up (no matter what type). It very often boils down to "find your true self, unburdened with many things you attached to yourself as you grew up". So at the core is the concept that you should minimize your persona until you cannot minimize it further.
I dig that a lot and I am seeing it as an universal principle in all areas of life. And it doesn't mean to "remove" your core traits. It means remove everything that isn't actually you. How do we find these things? Well, it's a lifetime journey but there are good ways to do it.
(This also reminded me of property-based testing where the testing framework is always shrinking a case that failed your tests until it finds the minimum value that can reproduce the failing test.)
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> It's a contradiction like many Buddhist teachings. By embracing suffering, you somehow avoid it.
Nothing contradictory about it. It seems that Buddhism (and other systems of belief) postulate that one of the traits of our Universe is: if you are not afraid of X, then X will be hitting you less. Kind of like school bullies, I guess?
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Sure, all of that is pretty abstract and philosophical. But as we go through life, we do start spotting patterns. The fact that they don't have a nice tidy name in Wikipedia doesn't devalue them.
I think it's incredible how Buddism and Stoicism arrived at such similar perspectives. And they are both incredibly relevant hundreds of years later.
I like the analogy with school bullies :)
Replying here to "F.ex. I want to live in a beach house in a relative solitude (with nearest city at 30-50km). Would I belong to the modern world then?" because I cannot reply directly to it:
I think there is a compromise between how much of the physical environment we can change vs is imposed by the rest of society. But I don't think you need to physically isolate to make impactful change. You can create a completely different experience, that nudges you in different directions while living even in an apartment in the city. With our wealth, information access and technology, each of us can push himself in a different direction through our information diet for example, objects in the home and their arrangement, intentional habits.
Absolutely, every self-reinvention breaks down. As a Christian, I posit that if these failures are accepted with humility, their rubble may help us recognize who we were meant to be.
Suffering is the foundation of experience. The author could not have arrived at his conclusions without suffering through what he did first. It's a contradiction like many Buddhist teachings. By embracing suffering, you somehow avoid it.