“The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.”
– Soren Kierkegaard
Identity is a complex topic. It has so many layers to it. If I ask you who you are, you probably won’t have just one answer.1Ramarajan, L. (2014). Past, present and future research on multiple identities: Toward an intrapersonal network approach. Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 589-659. You can be different things to different people and at different times. Everything that comes after “I am” is part of your identity.
- “I am X.”
- “I am Y.”
- “I am Z.”
Some of our identities are more important to us than others. For example, someone might say, “I am a father first and then a businessman”. The identities that are the most dear to us- our dominant identities are our core identities. People tend to have 1-3 core identities and many secondary identities.
Core identities, needs, and values
Health, wealth, and relationships are fundamental human needs. Anybody who says they don’t want one or more of these is probably lying. You feel good when you do things that boost your health, wealth, and relationships. It’s your mind’s way of reinforcing good behavior. You feel bad when you do things detrimental to these fundamental life areas. It’s your mind’s way of punishing bad behavior.
But there’s more to the story. We also have another critical layer on top of these fundamental human needs. These are:
- Significance
- Contribution
- Connection
- Certainty
- Uncertainty
- Growth
If you were raised in a healthy and secure environment, you probably have a good balance of these needs. You seek to meet these needs equally. But most of us were not raised in secure environments. So, based on our early traumatic experiences, some of these needs got dialed up, and others got dialed down.
For instance, if you grew up in an environment where you had decent levels of connection with others but felt trapped and helpless, your mind will prioritize growth needs over connection needs.
This is where our core values come from. Only you can determine what your core values are. When you act by your core values, you feel fulfilled. When you don’t, you feel lost, like something is missing from your life.
Your primary “I am” should align with your strongest core value so that you feel you have purpose and direction in your life. If that’s not the case, you’re bound to feel lost. In other words, you feel a sense of being lost and other negative emotions like anxiety and depression when there’s a mismatch between who you are right now and your ideal self. Your ideal self is the person who’s living in alignment with your core values. The closer your real self is to your ideal self, the higher your self-esteem. The greater the discrepancy between your real/current self, the lower your self-esteem.2Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Identity, self-concept, and self-esteem: The self lost and found. In Handbook of personality psychology (pp. 681-710). Academic Press.
Identity crisis – why we lose ourselves
Theoretically, taking care of your core needs, health, wealth, and relationships would be best. These are your fundamental needs buckets. Ideally, there should be a balance among these needs. It would help if you were filling each of these needs buckets equally, distributing your time and energy evenly across these areas.
But what often happens is that a person gives disproportionate time and energy to one life area at the cost of other areas. For instance, career-driven people may over-invest their time and energy into building wealth, ignoring their health, relationships, and even core values. As they do this, they start to feel that they’re losing themselves because ‘themselves’ also includes their other life areas. When you ignore a life area, you ignore a part of who you are.
You'll feel lost sooner or later if you don’t live a balanced life. You’ll question your life choices. You’ll question whether you’re truly living in accordance with your values.
To give you another example, a person may invest disproportionately into their core need for significance at the cost of other life areas. People with a core need for significance often meet this need by seeking attention. For instance, this person may constantly seek validation from social media. When they get the ‘likes’, their ‘significance bucket’ gets filled. They feel they have purpose and meaning.
However, they might ignore other essential life areas to pursue attention. They might be spending too much time on their phone. They might be stressed, affecting their health. They might not be making decent money, affecting their wealth. You can’t ignore an important life area for too long. Sooner or later, it’ll catch up to you, forcing you to shift gears.
If this person’s social media account gets hacked or something, they’ll suddenly realize that they’ve been ignoring other essential life areas. They’ll feel lost and experience an identity crisis. If they lived a more balanced life from the start, they’d be satisfied that at least their wealth and health are in order, even if they can no longer meet their core need for significance in the same way.
What to do when you feel lost
If you’re feeling lost in life, you’re likely over-investing your time and energy into one or more life areas. Finding yourself again is just a matter of doing an audit of what you do daily and how much of it goes into filling your most important buckets or life areas.
Ideally, you want to live a balanced life where you equally prioritize your most important areas and core needs. But there are phases in our lives when we can’t help but live an unbalanced life. This is often a consequence of not living a balanced life from the start.3Alleyne, T. S. (2016). Work Life Balance–What Balance?. Frontiers in Pediatrics, 3, 102.
Say you’ve been ignoring your relationships for a long time and over-investing in your career. You experience a setback in your career that makes you re-evaluate your life. You realize that you’ve been over-identifying with your career. You lack identity diversification.
Now, as a desperate measure of counterbalance, you start over-investing in your relationships. While this imbalance may be necessary for some time, till your relationships get off the ground and reach some stability, you wouldn’t have needed imbalance to counter imbalance had you lived a more balanced life from the get-go.
When you audit everything you do daily, ensure you’re devoting most of your time to your important life areas and core needs. Focus on how you feel when you do something.
Prioritize activities that fill you up in less time. For instance, talking to someone on the phone for an hour may be more filling than spending 2 hrs on social media.
More activities should be on your list that fill you or give you energy than those that drain your energy. If you pull that, you’ll live according to your values. If your mind is punishing you for doing something, listen to it and kick that activity out of your life if you can. Some you’ll need to do less of. Others you may have to delegate.
If you don’t know what makes you feel good and what doesn’t, you need to try more things. Eventually, you will find what makes you tick or fills you up. Other people can’t figure this out for you. They don’t have access to your internal states and feelings. Nobody has a ‘gift’ that they need to discover within themselves. All you have to do is find out what makes you tick and then keep ticking along those lines.