[oroul]

> sense of me-ness is real

The most important word here is "sense" -- I don't think anyone can argue that the sense of individuality isn't real. But how much of our personal narratives are true, and how much of them do we make up to try and make sense of an otherwise chaotic existence? That isn't a fluffy philosophical musing; it's a core question of human psychology.

Some Buddhist teachings speak of "word sickness", where we spend so much of our lives living in abstractions that we are unable to experience the present moment as it actually is. We've drawn boxes around phenomena to try and classify everything, without realizing that we do this in ways that reinforce our own identities and sense of meaning in the world. We tend to treat the things we are good at as more important than the things we aren't, for instance. So how much of one's concept of self is really real, and how much has been invented to coalesce a sense of identity?