Choose your self, presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face. Erving Goffman
“A person’s identity is not to be found in behavior...but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going”― Anthony Giddens
“I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.”, Charles Horton Cooley
Tourism today means taking part in a public performance, like going to a show, a parade, or a protest. Moehller & D’Ambriaso, 2021
“We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others, our parents, for instance, and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.” ― Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism
Identity: Genuine pretending: balancing various identity technologies that involve a certain degree of authenticity but also performativity to support the good life. This balance includes how we relate to various intersections of group membership.
Genuine pretending is a conscious act. Genuine pretending is a balance between being genuine and performing in our identity practices. Moehller and D’Ambrioso (2021) argue that there are three technologies for constructing an identity: authenticity, sincerity, and profility. In a given culture, these may be experienced by the subject as a form of compulsion, for example, a compulsion toward authenticity, to strive for a “true self” in order to access a core that is spontaneous and does not need to be performed. Genuine pretending involves using various identity technologies while always remaining aware that a certain degree of pretense (performativity) is inherent in them; this reduces the likelihood of falling into identity crises, such as an authenticity crisis in which we feel we are not authentic enough (Moehller & D’Ambrioso, 2021).
Moehller and D’Ambrioso argue that even though one might strive for authenticity and never want to pretend, pretense is inevitable to some degree (2021). Everyone engages in a genuine form of pretense regarding their identity; some focus more on pretense through persona, building, roles, and irony, while others are more oriented toward genuineness through sincerity and authenticity. Paradoxically, even those who perceive themselves as authentic and strive for authenticity may be engaging in pretense without being aware of it. There are scripts, practices, and emotional rules constructed to appear authentic. Something arbitrarily coded as authentic is being more impulsive, a trait that has no basis in the idea that it is more authentic, since what one does on impulse may simply be social scripts. Even having hobbies that one is a “nerd” about is coded as authentic, but as Adorno has pointed out, hobbies are an expression of a depoliticized present in which one turns one’s gaze inward toward one’s own niche, which is magnified to the point that the common good is forgotten.
Identify and bring to light the identity technologies you most often use and those used by others around you. Is there a lot of role, playing, irony, sincerity, authenticity, or self, promotion? Which ones are used around you? If you use an identity technology too much, the bond becomes so strong that it can be burdensome.
Try out new identity technologies to reduce the intensity of a particular one. If you’re always sincere and serious, try incorporating more humor and irony into your life. The risk is that someone who always wants to be sincere and fully embrace a certain role can end up taking things far too seriously. Roles can take over one’s thinking to the point where it’s impossible to maintain a certain ironic distance from them. For someone who is stuck in a certain imposed role, consciously and genuinely “pretending” serves as an antidote, as it creates a certain distance from the imposed role. Hochschild calls this “surface acting,” which can be practiced in the workplace (2003). Some people use “deep acting” in their work role, which carries the risk of creating emotional dissonance and alienation from their feelings (Hochschild, 2003; Asplund, 1987). Those who have strived for authenticity can try resting within the framework of a specific role as a support and see how different parts of themselves can emerge. Those who are merely ironic, using humor to create a perceived safe distance from what is difficult, can practice sincerity by expressing what they actually feel or think. You don’t have to give up humor and irony, but rather mix them in. The risk of constant irony and humor is that you may find it difficult to commit to other people or various goals, since nothing seems to matter. Irony can lead to nihilism if overused, a phenomenon metaphorically referred to as “irony poisoning.”
Profiling as an identity technology allows people to create different profiles or avatars. Many in online communities are drawn to this. Being one profile, or several, is like switching between roles, which can create a sense of ease. The important thing is to reflect on whether you’re engaging in too much pretense or too much authenticity, as both can become burdensome if taken to extremes. Taylor is critical of the normative authenticity of our time, which is narcissistic and inward, looking and neglects the pursuit of the common good (1991). Taylor suggests that authenticity can be linked to the common good and an outward perspective. This proposal is valuable because decentralizes one’s own identity and shifts the focus of identity, building outward toward what one ought to do. It is an exercise in moralizing one’s identity, building, which can often be absent when roles, authenticity, or public personas become an end in themselves for the sake of fitting in or climbing a status hierarchy. One effect of striving for authenticity is that one can feel fake, like an “imposter,” in the sense that one isn’t grounded in the role one claims to embody. Consciously engaging in genuine pretending is the solution, because then one allows oneself to pretend to some extent, just as everyone else does. You can work through the feeling of not being grounded by seeking feedback from others, preferably about how grounded and competent you actually are.
Embrace otherness. Give up the idea of discovering your innermost, authentic self. Identity needs to be discovered through encounters with others. Charles Taylor writes: “...discovering my own identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.” What a person is is defined in contrast to other people. Otherness is always a part of the self, it is what is compared to and clarifies one’s own self. One way to embrace otherness is by devoting oneself to a project of self, cultivation. Self, cultivation, as a transformation of personality and character through learning and culture, has points of contact with genuine make, believe. Part of self, cultivation is engaging with others’ perspectives, where we use our imagination, through books, for example, to pretend to be other people for a moment. This becomes embedded in one’s identity, so this act of pretending shapes one’s identity. Self, cultivation has also been associated with authenticity because, through it, one can create a more original identity as a result of one’s own biography and the cultural works one has encountered. We possess a certain degree of awareness and agency when we view our own identity from a distance.
Build identity through moral actions, not merely through discourse, being, or appearance. I view genuine role, playing as a socio, technological resource because it is a way to redirect our focus; instead of constructing and shaping our identity to perfection using various identity technologies, we can focus on becoming better people ethically, a process tied to actions. Actions thus reduce the focus on the self and identity, as these constructs are silenced. An identity centered more on morality can become a heavy burden if we feel we are failing to live up to the ideals we claim to uphold. Identity must therefore also be based on simply being human, where there is room for hedonism and simply being, without the pressure to perform morally. This makes it easier for us to accept that we are not morally perfect. It also allows us to practice living a good moral life, where we cannot expect to be perfect, since that is the most difficult task we all face.
A sociological biography of yourself. Habermas has written that “Only one who takes charge of his own life history can see in it the realization of his self. The responsibility to take charge of one’ ’s own biography means becoming clear about who one wants to be.” Because psychological thinking is so widespread, people’s life stories tend to be grounded precisely in unclear and vague psychological ideas mixed with naïve common sense. Psychological and psychiatric consciousness can cause one’s biography to fall short in terms of how deeply embedded one is in society. Thoughts about attachment, trauma, irrational thinking, being “broken,” merely a victim, or a specific psychiatric diagnosis can become dominant. An important aspect of a psychologically informed life biography is that a “psychological failure” can arise, the feeling that one should have been able to act differently and be better, given all the help that psychology promises (Illouz, 2008). A sociologization of a life biography would make several things possible. First, one could gain distance from the very process of psychologization and its effects on one’s life. It becomes possible to examine how various discourses, regimes of emotion, habitus, fields, structures, practices, socialities, ideals, and norms have influenced one throughout life. Above all, a sociologization leads to one’s life story becoming part of society’s history, with its problems and injustices (Mills, 1959). Sociologization also changes what is possible. It explains why we have failed to achieve what we want and why life has been difficult: because our agency and projectivity have been partial and distributed. Sociologization should not lead us to see ourselves merely as victims of the society we live in; rather, we assume that agency still exists, even if it is partial.
What kind of audience are you to yourself? Who is your reference committee (Kemper, 2011)? What is your “generalizing other” (Mead, 1934)? Audience, reference committee, and generalizing other are different metaphors for capturing the way we internalize the gazes and perceptions of others. One exercise might be to try to clarify who your audience is, the one you’re performing for, who your reference committee is that deliberates on what you should do, and how you might describe the generalized other as a collection of the social context in which you’ve been immersed for so long that you’ve automated the thoughts that exist there. Goffman writes:
A performer may be taken in by his own act, convinced at the moment that the impression of reality he fosters is the one and only reality. In such cases, we have a sense in which the performer becomes his own audience; he becomes both performer and observer of the same show. Presumably, he internalizes or incorporates the standards he attempts to maintain in the presence of others, so that even in their absence, his conscience compels him to act in a socially appropriate manner. Erving Goffman
Deal with intersections and don’t let a particular group identity define you. How do you deal with discrimination based on your group identity? One needs to engage in strategic resistance through education, learn the rules of the game in various fields, make visible what one is subjected to, and embrace a partial victimhood to emphasize that victimhood is real, but not too much, as this can lead to vulnerability by diminishing one’s agency and, paradoxically, provoke more conflict and aggression from the other (Manning & Campbell, 2018).
Find strength in groups and communities where you can pool your power together. Find allies outside your coded group affiliation to reduce the potential demonization of other groups you have an aversion to. Another approach is to de, center the group identity on which one is discriminated against in order to give oneself more room to maneuver. Actively building identities around activities and endeavors, such as projects or educational pursuits, allows one to establish a stronger framework that defines oneself as something other than a specific group identity.
Decentering one’s group identity too strongly in an attempt to hide it can become a heavy burden to bear. It’s a delicate balancing act between trying to give oneself space while not completely disconnecting from a particular group identity that carries social baggage. There is strength in being able to embrace an identity that has been suppressed; that sense of alienation can be a source of resistance and a sense of justice.
Today we live in an era where the pursuit of authenticity is strong (Taylor, 1991), which leads to various group affiliations, which are often actually random and arbitrary, being incorporated into that concept of authenticity. What has been assigned to one entirely arbitrarily is perceived as something “authentic.” This can bind one more strongly than necessary, since there is no authenticity in something one has been arbitrarily born into, even if advertisements for authentic experiences with authentic cultures might lead one to believe otherwise.
Do not use group membership to gain advantages unless it can be justified by being generally discriminated against. Hakim (2010), like the later, created “looksmaxxing” community with profiles such as Clavicular, has argued that women should maximize their erotic capital because it can be exchanged for other forms of capital, such as social and economic capital. However, this is a zero, sum game in which one person’s advantage becomes another’s disadvantage. The group identity of being considered “attractive” brings advantages because it is normalized in today’s society to discriminate based on perceived attractiveness, a phenomenon known as “lookism.” Generally, there are costs associated with the good life when one uses their group identity as an advantage. Those from the upper class who use their social, educational, and economic capital will pay the price by becoming “elitized” and “wealthified” (Berglund, 2026), exhibiting a lack of empathy, virtue signaling (Liu, 2021), and moral laziness. People often get caught up in a status struggle and the meritocratic trap (Markovits, 2019). Those who turn their ethnicity into an advantage will easily be influenced by the status that their ethnicity holds in a country. Belonging to the majority ethnic group and having gained advantages based on that will make one feel threatened and vulnerable if others’ ethnic identities gain more influence in society (e.g., Hochschild, 2024).
Gender abolitionism. Contemporary society is fixated on gender. This is evident both among those who defend the prevailing binary order and, often, among those who attempt to resist it through queer identities. Gender can become something that supplants other sources of one’s identity, leading to an imbalance, since gender in and of itself has no moral content. An obsession with gender in the construction of one’s identity can thus become an end in itself, much like the pursuit of happiness, that makes it more difficult to seek the good moral life. Just as appearance can become too dominant a factor in one’s identity, so can gender. Practices and exercises that de, center the gender aspect of one’s identity include education, action, projects, activities, creativity, nature, reading, and so on. Seek out adventures and challenges that ensure gender does not become the primary goal, but rather that the moral life does. Of course, injustices linked to gender can be made a moral focus, but it is important that one’s identity centers on the civic struggle rather than on belonging to a particular gender. Sometimes we believe we are not dominated by gender even though we are. Much of the effort put into “looking better” is often an effort to confirm a certain gender ideal. This can be expressed in exercise, where one strives to look more masculine or feminine through workouts targeting specific muscles.
Reduce narcissism. One’s identity and the process of constructing identity can become a project that consumes other projects. Identity becomes an overarching goal that may no longer support the pursuit of the good life. Contemporary society is characterized by ontological insecurity (Giddens, 1991), which makes the creation of a stable identity a way to cope with that insecurity. Stability is created by establishing clear roles, by being completely authentic, or by creating different profiles (Moehller & D’Ambrosio, 2021). But if this effort becomes too one, sided and takes up too much space, we will lose stability and security because we disconnect from a moral project; we become more solipsistic, inwardly focused on our own identity project. As a result, one may indulge in the “narcissism of minor differences,” which can instead create significant stress in the act of comparison and even in the boundary, drawing work done against groups one does not wish to belong to. It becomes a struggle focused on “respectability” (Skeggs, 1997) in a hollow battle for status. Identity becomes a tool for moral superiority, while simultaneously blocking the good life. A better way to create stability is through an outward concern for the other (Paulsen, 2020), where one is embedded and stabilized by the projects, routines, and socialities of which one is a part.
Stability and openness. A metaphor for a self one can strive toward is a “membrane self” (Berglund, 2026). It is a porous self that lets others and society in. At the same time, it is possible to have some kind of barrier, that is, a membrane, that can filter what comes in. However, the membrane must be constructed in conjunction with the social world. The membrane is a stored form of sociality derived from what we have internalized, which serves as a shield against other discourses that might otherwise be internalized.
Distance yourself from perfectionism, whether it stems from dominant societal norms or even your own self, imposed, niche ideals. In CBT, perfectionism is viewed as an irrational cognitive distortion. The solution is to distance yourself from perfectionism in general and to be more accepting of imperfections in your own being. The focus should be on moral perfection, that which is humanly possible. Perfectionism in performing a task at work, or regarding one’s appearance, or how things look when hosting a dinner party, is a “lifestyle, oriented” perfectionism that often does not support the good life. Moral perfectionism causes our lives to be focused on living as perfectly as possible. Perfectionism as a goal in sociotherapy can easily lead to eudaimonic depression (Berglund, 2026) if one does not build toward it gradually and create momentum through moral gains.
Transformation and metamorphosis for the good life. Ego, reification is a recurring problem, that is, the self becoming fixed (Paulsen, 2017). It is unlikely that the self we have after childhood is the one that best supports the pursuit of the good life. This means that our self will need to be transformed as part of building a habitus that best supports the good life. Our self, image needs to be shaped according to the good life. Exactly what the good life entails is uncertain, which draws us into an open search. This open search must also be directed toward our self with a caring curiosity.