Who are you beyond what you consume?

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:04]What do you think defines you? No, really. Not what you do or what your life looks like online. Also, I'm not talking about the kind of music you listen to or the books that you read or the clothes you wear and where you've traveled. Who are you underneath all of that? I've been thinking a lot about identity lately. What does that actually mean? What does identity mean? Is it something that we build or do we buy it or do we perform it? We all seem to be curating selves and showing them to the world. But is that identity? Is that personhood or is that a brand? I think we've come to believe that personal identity equals an aesthetic or like a mood board. So when I ask you who are you, what comes to mind for you might be like this carefully curated combination of oat milk and tote bags and linen trousers and feminist literature and film cameras or whatever the algorithm has decided is the current shorthand for being a person with depth. And listen, before we go any further, I want to be very clear that I'm not standing outside of this culture. I'm not on some moral high ground looking down at everyone from my little philosophers's tower. That's not the case at all. I love all those things. I love feminist literature. I love tote bags. I love when my life looks like the life I want to be living.

[00:01:31]Right? And I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with these things. It's more that it becomes worrying when we use these material things as markers of identity. And underneath the consumerism, we haven't actually done the real work of figuring out who we are and what we stand for. So the problem is not the accessories. I think the problem is mistaking the accessories of a life for the life itself.

[00:02:01]And maybe the scarier question is who benefits from us believing this? Because someone always does. Someone is always selling us something. And increasingly in the age of latestage capitalism, marketing is far more manipulative than we give it credit for. We're not directly being sold products anymore. We are being sold an identity, a dream version of ourselves, but that identity just happens to come with some products, you know. So, it's not like you buy a water bottle anymore. You buy the kind of person who drinks 3 L of water a day and has her life together. You don't just buy a notebook. You buy the fantasy of becoming someone who journals every morning and finally understands herself.

[00:02:48]And similarly, you don't just buy the running shoes. You buy discipline, reinvention, that kind of thing. Again, none of this is bad. Objects can be meaningful and clothes can be expressive. I love clothes. I love fashion. Those things aren't bad. And yeah, rituals can help us become who we want to be. And sometimes buying the running shoes really does help you start running. But the problem begins when the symbol replaces the substance.

[00:03:17]When we want the identity without the practice, the aesthetic without the discipline. And this is where I want to bring in Socrates. Okay, so I have been missing university a lot lately. If you've been reading my Substack articles, I'm sure you can tell because I've been thinking up homework for myself left and right, writing think pieces on Substack like the unemployed.

[00:03:40]But I'm also halfway through a online philosophy course called Know Thyself.

[00:03:46]And it's all about the philosophy of self-nowledge. And if you're interested, I'll link it down below. Go and sign up.

[00:03:51]I urge you to take advantage of some of the few good things that the internet actually gives us. So the whole course takes its starting point from the Socratic dictim which is the unexamined life is not worth living. And I'll explain that in a second. But first it's important for you to know that Socrates was a Greek philosopher who lived in Athens around like 400 BC. And he is often regarded as one of the fathers of western philosophy. And what Socrates did was walk around Athens asking people questions. And these questions seemed very simple at first. He would ask things like, "What is justice? What is courage? What is love? What is the good life?" And then people would answer, probably thinking, "Okay, cool. This old barefoot man, he's asking me a question.

[00:04:42]I'll humor him." But then Socrates would keep going. He would ask another question and then another question until it becomes very clear that the person who's answering these questions aren't actually sure about their answers. They would realize that the thing that they thought they understood they did not actually understand at all.

[00:05:05]Their answers would maybe start to contradict itself or it would fall apart or it would reveal that they had inherited a belief without ever really examining it. And this line of questioning, this thing that Socrates did, walking around asking people all these questions, eventually got him the death penalty, which is very on brand for society, don't you think? We tend to get quite uncomfortable when someone asks too many good questions. So the Socratic dictim, let's go back to that for a second. He said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Now, that sounds very dramatic, but I don't think Socrates meant that every life must be turned into some intense intellectual project where we all sit around in robes debating ethics until sunset. No, I think he meant that to be human in the fullest sense requires self-examination.

[00:05:59]But here's where it gets interesting because his definition of self-examination is very different from what we today would think of as introspection. If we think of self-examination today, we might think of therapy or journaling or sitting alone with your thoughts, thinking about things like your attachment styles or your fears or your relationship with your parents. And all of those things are important and it's valid and useful, but it's not what Socrates meant. So for Socrates, self-nowledge revolved around beliefs about big concepts like what do we believe is justice and freedom and love and truth and beauty and goodness and all these things. And today we might add to that list like what do we believe about success? What do we believe about money? What do we believe about AI and creativity? Right? So we can add to that. And another thing which is important, Socrates did not think we could arrive at these answers alone just by sitting in a room and thinking deeply. He believed truth emerged through dialogue. So through following a line of questioning with other people and by putting your beliefs into words and then allowing them to be tested by another person's curiosity or their skepticism or discernment and perspective. Okay? So, it's not just you sitting alone with your thoughts, it's you testing your beliefs against other people's perspectives, which is interesting. And that's not something we get today because today, what would have been the town square where a lot of people gather with different opinions, we have the town square in our pockets on our phones, which is an algorithm filled with people and opinions that only agree with you.

[00:07:46]It's really hard to then take part in the Socratic dialogue. And one thing that I love about what Socrates did, like asking people these questions, it's similar to journaling or having long conversations, and it's why these things are revolutionary because they force you to make the vague thing concrete. You can walk around with a feeling or an idea for years, something that's maybe like a private belief that lives inside of you, but the moment you try to put it into words, you realize whether or not you actually understand it. and where the gaps are that you still need to fill in. And most importantly, it also helps you to see which parts of this belief come from you and you can defend them and you have reasons for them and which ones have just been absorbed from your family or your culture or social media without you actually ever having thought about why you believe that. And that I think is where identity begins. Not in what you buy or the curated identities we present for the sake of online perception which make us feel secure.

[00:08:56]Identity begins with what we have examined. It lies in what you believe and why and what you value and whether you are willing to live according to the things that you say you value. And identity lies in what you keep choosing to be when nobody is watching, when you aren't being perceived, which is very different from the way identity seems to work in our society today. Because right now, we live in an age of readymade selves. It seems that we don't have to do the awkward slow work of figuring out who we are. We can just choose a template. Jumb bro, granola girl, cool girl, wellness girl, Pilates princess, old money, trad wife, van life. It's all there. It's a readymade self. I do think there is something interesting and slightly sinister about how many of our modern identities arrive with a purchasable aesthetic.

[00:09:56]Now, what do I mean by that? So, the clean girl wears beige athleisure. She drinks matcha. See, she has a certain skin care routine. The gem bro has the protein powder and the headphones and the supplements and the meal prep containers and the pricey gem and the personality that may or may not be like 60% creatine. Yeah. And then the cottage core girl has the linen dresses. And the sourdough starter and the ceramic mugs.

[00:10:24]And the dark academia person has the blazers and the old books and the candles and the coffee maker and the slightly haunted expression of someone who has read one poem and now understands mortality. I say all of this with love because yes, it is fun. It's fun to dress up as the version of yourself you want to become. And it's fun to create little rituals and romanticize your life. I do that, too.

[00:10:50]But underneath the fun is a question that I think we really do need to ask ourselves. How much of this is self-expression?

[00:10:59]And how much of it is self construction through consumption?

[00:11:05]How much of this is who we are? And how much of this is what we have been sold?

[00:11:11]Because capitalism is very good at one thing in particular, finding our deepest human needs and turning them into markets. For example, our need for beauty becomes a list of skincare products. Our need for self-improvement becomes a subscription-based learning app. Our need for love becomes a dating app. Our need for meaning becomes a productivity system. our need for identity becomes an aesthetic.

[00:11:41]Do you see what I'm saying here? Carl Marx wrote about something called commodity fetishism, which is basically this idea that under capitalism, objects become enchanted and we stop seeing them just as objects behind which is human labor and social relations and instead the commodity itself starts to feel magical. The thing becomes infused with the desire we have for purchasing it. So the bag is not just a bag anymore. Now it is a transformation. Suddenly it becomes the promise of status and desiraability.

[00:12:16]It promises that if you buy the thing, you will somehow become the kind of person who owns that thing. Follow the logic. And this is where consumerism becomes spiritual. And not spiritual in a beautiful transcendent way, but spiritual in the sense that it starts answering questions that religion or philosophy or community or art wants answered. Questions like who am I? What should I desire? How should I love? How should I live? What will save me? What will make me whole? What will make me lovable?

[00:12:52]Religion once answered that. Philosophy once answered that. But now capitalism is the one saying yes, I can answer that here by this. And the algorithm says, I know exactly which version of salvation you're most likely to click on.

[00:13:06]So the French theorist Udebar wrote about the society of the spectacle where social life becomes mediated through images. And in a spectacle, it's not enough to just live. Life has to appear.

[00:13:19]It has to be represented. It has to become an image of itself. And I think about that all the time now because it increasingly feels as though we are not living unless our lives are being witnessed.

[00:13:35]Like you go on a walk and you see the birds and you feel human for one split second and then your impulse is should I post about this? And what makes it funnier is that there is this huge trend that I've been seeing online since the start of the year where people say that we should all go offline and then people make content about how bad content is and they say that, oh, I'm going to go offline for a week and then they run straight back online to tell us what they have learned. You know, it's like, I went on a walk without my phone.

[00:14:08]Here's what I learned. I went off of Instagram for one week. Let me go back to Instagram and tell everybody how great I am, how present, and how human, and how healed I am. It's very dystopian if I'm being honest. And again, it's funny because I do this, too. I'm literally a person who processes her life by writing about it and then putting it on the internet. So, believe me, this critique is coming from inside the house. We're in it together. But I do think about it and it is strange isn't it that even our attempts to escape performance become part of the performance. Even our authenticity has to be documented. The philosopher John Budriard wrote about sumulakra and simulation. This idea that in modern society we don't just deal with reality anymore but with copies of copies of reality. representations become more powerful than the real thing and the image replaces the experience.

[00:15:13]The sign replaces the substance and I think that is what is happening with identity online today. You don't have to be politically engaged. You just have to repost the right infographic. That kind of thing. And I know that sounds harsh because yeah, sometimes the signal is the beginning of the substance.

[00:15:32]Sometimes reposting the infographic is someone's first step into caring. And if you, you know, dress like the person you want to become, it helps you become that person. Fake it till you make it. That kind of thing. But I think we need to be honest about the difference between signaling a value and living a value.

[00:15:52]Because the internet has made it very easy to feel close to goodness without practicing that goodness. You know, you can see a feminist reel and repost it and for a moment you feel aligned with the kind of person who cares about gender- based violence or injustice and inequality and that's not nothing, right? Awareness does matter. But if that is where it ends, then we do have to ask, did we act or did we only perform the appearance of concern? Did we actually go to the protest and donate? Did we read more deeply and have a difficult conversation? Did we change anything in our lives? Did Did you write something yourself or make something or risk something or sacrifice something?

[00:16:39]Or did we just momentarily decorate our online self with the aesthetics of care?

[00:16:45]That's worth asking ourselves. And this is where Belle Hooks becomes so important for me. And if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you'll know Belle Hooks well. She is one of my favorite feminist philosophers.

[00:16:58]So, Belle Hooks writes about love not just as a feeling but as an action. So, she defines love really beautifully. She says that it is a practice and a choice and more than that it is a commitment to the growth and flourishing of ourselves and others. It is a commitment and I think that distinction is everything because online we are surrounded by the aesthetics of love and justice and care and depth. But love and justice and and depth and these things these things are not just an aesthetic. At some point it has to become a practice. It has to cost you something. Real values shape your real life. They change how you spend your time and how you treat people and how you spend your money and what you refuse to spend your money on, what you refuse to do and what you make space for. And it also comes down to the things that you do when there is no applause, when no one is perceiving you.

[00:17:59]And maybe that's the thing I keep coming back to. Who are you when no one is watching? Who are you when there is no camera and no audience?

[00:18:08]That's a good question.

[00:18:10]Suren Kirkagard was very interested in the concept of the individual in what it means to become a self and for him becoming a self was not about conforming to the crowd or disappearing into public opinion. It was more of an inward difficult and for him often anxious process and he wrote about the crowd as an untruth which feels almost aggressively relevant now because we live inside the crowd all the time. And the thing is the crowd is no longer just the people in the town square. The crowd is in our pockets and it is in the comment section. We escape the crowd to go to the online crowd. And it is exhausting because the online crowd doesn't just tell you what to think. It tells you how to appear. Be vulnerable but not messy. Intelligent but still relatable. Attractive but not vain. Ambitious but not cringe. Right?

[00:19:06]And so the self becomes this endless negotiation. Not just who am I but how will this be received? How will I be perceived?

[00:19:17]And that question is like a cage because when you are constantly imagining yourself from the outside, you start losing contact with yourself from the inside. You become both the performer and the audience. The person living and the person watching yourself live.

[00:19:35]You're the subject and the brand manager, the human and the product. And that's the other thing I want to talk about because everybody is trying to sell you something now. Yes, we know that. But what you may have not fully realized is that everybody is also trying to sell themselves.

[00:19:52]Influencers are not the exception anymore. They have become the blueprint.

[00:19:57]The influencer sells a version of life to aspire to, right? They sell a way of living or a face or a body and then you buy certain things to get closer to that version of a self. But what's strange is that we have all inherited this logic.

[00:20:15]You don't have to have a million followers to feel like you are supposed to be a brand. The job market nowadays asks you to be a brand. Creative industries ask you to be a brand. Hell, even dating apps want you to be a brand.

[00:20:29]And that's the thing, if we can get back to the creative industries for a second, that really has been annoying me because it is impossible to be a creative in this day and age without having some kind of an online presence. And that's something that I've been struggling with a lot lately. I truly despise the way that short form media platforms have co-opted our attention spans and our creativity and individuality for the profit of big tech. I truly hate that in every empty moment people open Instagram. I hate what it's doing to our relationships, our brains. And yet, if I want to be a writer in 2026, I have to have an audience. I love making this podcast, right? I love this kind of media. It's long for deep thinking content that I'm grateful for you for sitting with me through. But to reach more people, I need to market the podcast on Instagram. and I need to turn this long episode into 20 second bite-sized clips that might or might not go viral. But then I'm left with this moral dilemma. Do I want to contribute to the content that keeps people hooked to these platforms? We are all in essence working for Meta for free. We are making content that are keeping ourselves and each other on these platforms that are not good for us so that our attentions can be sold to whoever advertises on there and then we make money for big tech. It's [ __ ] scary. And yes, it is a big deal.

[00:22:04]Also, there's another layer to this. To be creative, you need to live a life offline. You need to have boredom and privacy and silence. and you need to have time to sometimes make ugly things or be confused or be unproductive. So, you need a life, but to try and get anywhere with that creativity, you need to show it to people online. And that is such a weird tension, isn't it? And I say this again as someone who is very much still inside of that contradiction because I love sharing my work. I love that the internet allows me to reach people I never would have reached otherwise. I love getting messages from someone in another country saying that this made me feel less alone. That is magic. That is real. That is not something that I want to dismiss.

[00:22:59]But I also feel the cost of it. I feel how easily the creative impulse becomes tangled with performance and how quickly the question changes from what do I need to say to will this perform well and I think a lot of creatives are feeling this and just to make it clear I don't think that there's anything inherently wrong with making art on the internet again that's literally my life but at least for me personally I've made the decision to focus my efforts on long form platforms that encourage deeper engagement. So like this podcast, like my blog over on Substack or YouTube, these can be really nice if you use it mindfully. But personally, I haven't had Tik Tok for a long time. I've deleted Instagram off my phone, so I only have access to it through my laptop so that I can every now and then if I want to post something, I can do that. So basically, I only see it when it's truly necessary, when I mindfully open it and I want to use it. And I'm not saying that's the right way to do it. I'm not saying that you are bad if you keep using these platforms. Not at all. Because we're all truly in the middle of it. And it is so part of our reality that yeah, if you want to be successful, a big part of that nowadays is that you have to have an online presence. So it's really hard to take a step back and get perspective.

[00:24:22]But that is what makes the questioning so much more important. We are at a point now where it goes beyond, oh, we're just spending too much time on our phones. Oh, my attention span is eroding. We're beyond that right now.

[00:24:35]Our very sense of identity and reality is being fractured and flattened. And we are being trained to package ourselves for a capitalist machine that wants everything simplified and marketable.

[00:24:48]And what's worse, these platforms used to be places where human creativity could be showcased, not just consumed.

[00:24:56]But now, right under our noses, the human makers are being replaced with machines so that all there is left for us to do is sit passively and consume. A brand has to know what it is selling, right? But you are not a brand. You are a human being. And a human being is not meant to be coherent. A human being is contradictory and strange and evolving and sometimes embarrassing. You can be independent and you can still want to be held. That's being a human. That's being a contradiction. You can love solitude and also feel lonely. Or you can be spiritual and skeptical. Or you can be a feminist and still want male validation.

[00:25:38]All of these things are contradictions.

[00:25:40]But it's what makes us so human. That is the texture of being alive.

[00:25:46]But the brand itself has no patience for contradiction. It wants clarity. It wants you to niche down so that the algorithm can understand you and know who to sell you to. And this, I think, is one of the biggest tragedies of the internet. Not that we are all becoming narcissists. I've heard that argument and I don't think that's true. Actually, it's too easy and it's too cruel of an explanation. I think that many of us are just trying to be loved and we are trying to feel seen and feel like we matter. We're trying to make a life that feels meaningful inside of systems that often make us feel invisible and replaceable.

[00:26:28]And maybe only in a society starved of love does the desire for fame and followers become so powerful. Because fame is kind of like this counterfeit form of love. Fame is not intimacy and attention is not love. And being perceived is not the same as being steam.

[00:26:46]And yet when people are lonely enough, visibility can start to feel like salvation. So Eric from in the art of loving [clears throat] writes about how modern capitalism turns people into commodities. We start to experience ourselves in terms of market value. Am I desirable? Am I impressive? Am I attractive and productive? And am I interesting enough to be chosen for someone to follow me? And I think this is part of why online life is so emotionally exhausting because we are not just consuming content. We are constantly measuring our own market value against other people's content.

[00:27:28]And then of course we try to improve the product. The product being ourselves and our lives. We try to upgrade the body, the wardrobe and the routine and the bio. And again I want to interject here because growth is beautiful. I'm not against growth. Growth rooted in self-love feels very different from growth rooted in market pressure. Growth in the name of loving yourself is based on wanting to become more alive and have a fuller life. But growth for optimization's sake is just based on becoming more sellable. And I think we have to learn how to tell the difference because the algorithm will not tell you.

[00:28:09]The algorithm does not care whether we are becoming more whole. It cares whether we are staying engaged. It does not care whether the identity it sells to us is good for us. It cares whether that identity makes us click by compare scroll and come back.

[00:28:29]And maybe that is why so many of these online identities feel comforting and unstable because yeah, they give us a little sense of belonging. It feels like we found our tribe, our community. It gives us a uniform and a way to understand ourselves and make this messy thing called living feel a little bit more knowable. But they are so fragile because they are built on external signs and external signs have to be constantly maintained through buying. You have to keep buying. You have to keep posting, updating yourself. The curated identity makes us feel secure but it is unstable underneath because it is dependent on being recognized and recognition is a very shaky foundation for life. Okay. So what the hell do we do with all of this? Because I don't think the answer is to pretend that we are above consumption. We all consume. We participate in this endless parade of buying and performing and being online. It is almost inescapable at this point. We all want to feel like we belong and we want recognition. These are human desires. But maybe the question is not how do I become pure and perfect and opt out completely. Maybe the question is just how do I become conscious?

[00:29:55]How do I notice what I am consuming and how it is shaping me? And how do I become conscious of myself again? And even all these years later, I think Socrates still had the right idea about this. We figure out who we are in communication with other people live in real life human interaction and conversations because it's then that we are forced to verbalize what we believe and give words to our thoughts about things in the world and allow others to disagree with us. And then we either defend ourselves and we strengthen our reasons for our beliefs or beautifully we might maybe see their point and we get to change our minds. But I do want to add something to what Socrates said here. I think it is incredibly powerful to have some sort of personal practice where you are thinking through your own thoughts and beliefs about things and forcing yourself to put it into words. Even if you're not testing it against anybody else's curiosity or people challenging you, at least for you, you have figured it out and penned it down and said it out loud.

[00:31:06]So for me, that has always been writing.

[00:31:08]But more recently, it has been this podcast because I take topics that I'm interested in and I force myself to think through it and actually follow my thoughts down the rabbit hole until I figured them out and I can say them into a mic in a way that kind of makes sense.

[00:31:25]and in a way that I'm willing to defend.

[00:31:28]And that for me has been very powerful for my self-nowledge. And of course, as this episode has probably proven to you, I'm also still in the middle of it. I'm still trying to figure it out. But being in the midst of trying to figure it out, I think is already going in the right direction. At least you are attempting the examined life, right? Because the Socratic dictim states the unexamined life is not worth living. But maybe in our time and for this episode we can add the unexamined identity is very easy to sell to because when you don't know who you are, the market will happily tell you. The algorithm will happily tell you. So maybe the work is to slow down enough to ask who am I becoming? Who profits from me becoming this? What do I believe and why? What do I value? What do I practice? What do I love doing when nobody applauds me? And who am I outside of the things that I consume?

[00:32:32]I have come to believe that identity is not something we find once and then we just display it forever. Identity is something we return to, something we question and practice and build and rebuild slowly. So to come to the title of this episode, are we what we consume?

[00:32:51]Yes, but only if you let it be. Maybe the better answer is we are what we examine, what we practice, and what we love. And maybe in a world trying to sell us ready-made selves, the most radical thing we can do is become difficult to package. Be messy and contradictory and alive, not an aesthetic, a person, a real one.

[00:33:16]I am your host Carmen Vit and you have just listened to the Lost and Found podcast, the space where we are literally figuring things out in real time together. Thank you for having spent this time with me and the fact that you clicked on this episode means that I know you are someone who wants to understand yourself better, who wants to understand the world better. And for that, I applaud you because there's not a lot of people left in the world who want to do that. Please hold on to that curiosity. Until next week, remember to get a little bit lost.