This is an excellent question that goes to the core of neoliberalism.
Self-expression, be yourself, I need to find out who I am, be your most authentic self – these are the manifestations of the very heart of the neoliberal subjectivity.
Here’s how it works.
You are a business. And you are also the manager of that business. It’s your duty to manage the business that is yourself in the best, most rational manner. You must control each aspect of your business and manage it successfully.
In the above statement we already see the seeds of an unsolvable problem. How can you be both the subject and the object of that subject’s actions? If the self is the business, then who manages it? Another self? Or the same one? As we optimize our productivity techniques, track our time to improve output, manage our sleep, extract all the potential we can from our intellectual and psychological resources while working to replenish them as we go, the split deepens between “I as the manager who is perennially unhappy with the underperforming worker” and “I as the underperforming worker who perennially fails to satisfy the demanding manager.”
The more successful one is at the neoliberal game, the deeper the rift. What am I, the business or its manager? The punisher or the punished? The owner or the resource?
The endless prattle about the true self and the need to express this true self is a manifestation of the efforts to heal that rift. They will always fail but they do bring temporary relief.
Brilliant question, thank you!
Clarissa's Blog 
This is part of why modernity is so wildly incompatible with Christianity.
Christianity gives us an identity to which all other possible identities are subject: we are children of God. Any hierarchy or identity that cannot give way to that chief identity must be rejected.
And the neoliberal worship of self cannot bear rejection.
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This is an interesting question and answer, the cult of self-expression and be-yourself always seemed a little off to me. Self-expression is one thing if it means being a fan of this band, or having a sense of clothing style or to express oneself artistically, because they don’t change anything biological about oneself.
It becomes a problem when people think they can change gender or race or get extensive plastic surgery, since these try to change something that is biologically impossible. Zuckerberg and his ilk are the sort of people who are so rich and used to getting their way that they cannot comprehend that they cannot change their biological selves, and this frustrates them.
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No.
The whole concept of “identity” the way we now use it is a golden calf.
The idol: Your identity is self-generated. It’s how you think of yourself, and how you present yourself to others, and it’s like a car chassis: you can customize it in a million ways, paint job, accessories, mods… and it’s an expression of your True Self(TM). It’s what you ARE. You are the sum of your thoughts and your freely-chosen expressions. AND you have to love your self. AND you and everyone else are required to accept and celebrate your True Self(TM).
You can probably spot a few glaring problems with that right off the starting block.
You are a created being that exists in multiple planes, and you are shaped on all of those planes by both internal and external influences. Not every thought you perceive is generated by you (for most of us, very few of our thoughts are our own!). For instance, sometimes a thought flits across your mindspace that originated from… a television jingle, or a book you read, or something a random asshole said on the internet. Is that thought YOU? Is it part of your True Self, and therefore impossible to subject to critical analysis and rejected (because if you reject any part of you, including a thought, you reject your self. And that would be failure to love, celebrate, and accept your self)?
The “identity”= self expression thing is a common belief, but it is very far from harmless.
It is a strategy crafted by marketing companies and Satan. You are your thoughts. You are your (carefully cultivated by mass media) aesthetic tastes. You are your favorite band, your favorite TV shows, and your favorite movie franchises. That’s why you buy the T-shirt, go to the convention, and proudly put the poster on your wall and the sticker on your car, and buy the plastic toys for your kids (or yourself). You are your fashion preferences and your book preferences and your artificial hair color and the media you consume. What do all those things have in common? You can buy them, and you don’t have to earn them.
St. Paisios said, thoughts are like airplanes. Always buzzing around in the sky: but you don’t have to build them an airport and let them land!
Within the Christian tradition, thoughts are important but thoughts are emphatically NOT the self. Achieving discipline over one’s thoughts is a core part of Christian practice. Failing to do so leaves you open to demonic influence. With that as a prior, it’s sensible to go back and ask: who would want you to have a basically commodified interchangeable-parts, buy-a-mod-pack *identity*?
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*(blushing for typos there)*
…am home with sick kids. Cleaning up vomit does nothing good for my copyediting…
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I’ve never seen the worldview of my teenage years, when I was a member of the self-expression cult, described better. I of course still have preferences about personal style, music, etc. but I know they are not the core of my being. My strange obsession and neuroticism about being “unique” from that time also vanished.
A lot of people would see this as a harmless teenage phase, and maybe it can be. But often it is not, and often it never ends.
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I know way too many people who never grew out of it.
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…and yeah, not like I’m not guilty of it myself, from my misspent youth. How do you think I know?
One of the perks of aging is… the more stuff I actually do, learn, fight, and accomplish, the less I care about having a curated self-image.
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A business needs to be able to rebrand, release a new brand of products, etc. What does that look like when a human being is a business? Exactly what you say.
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“A business needs to be able to rebrand…. What does that look like when a human being is a business?”
Businesses are also expected to reduce their personnel (aka layoffs) when times get tough and generally to treat employees as disposable machine parts.
Viewing oneself as a disposable machine part that no longer produces enough value is a one way ticket to…..
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Yes. It’s a terrible worldview. It’s not surprising that levels of depression and anxiety are rising.
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