Identity

The less identity, the more violence. --Marshall McLuhan

I've used this quote before. It's one of my favourites. So it's amazing to me that it still holds unlearned lessons.

I ask this as I'm walking to Wal-Mart around 12:30AM last Thursday night (Friday morning by then), having just finished a library work shift, doing violence to myself. No, I'm not harming myself--in a suicidal or depressive manner. But I ought to be at home sleeping, and to spend these next two hours doing violence to my health--is that any different? Most people are too afraid of the stigma of suicide, so they do violence to themselves in other ways--overwork being foremost in my mind. Is all of this just a search for identity?

As for me, I'm walking to Wal-Mart to get a fishing pole and peanuts, which I absolutely need for tomorrow. (Don't ask.) (Yet.) And this is only the second two-hour slot I've had free all day. (The first I used to make an oboe reed. The reed ended up failing, so I played Saturday's band concert on a reed that was far too hard, and had my lips die on the second number.) Thus, I have a very legitimate reason to go.

Still, this is violence to myself, for whatever "reasons" I may use to justify--so I propose the question: Who the heck am I?

Well, a student for one, though not a very good one. In which case, I'm not actually a student; merely a guy who pays lots of money to pose as one. I could be a musician--though I've yet to have a performance lately in which I haven't had something to criticize myself for at the end. Which brings up a point--we get our identities from what validates us.

Where do I seek validation? Internet forums? Ouch. But true. I am somehow valid if a comment I post online is replied to. Positively, that is; having your comment utterly debunked usually has the opposite effect. Computer games? Amazing how outwitting an artificial intelligence makes one a man. Even having a fantasy hockey team ranked in the upper 100s in all of Yahoo! makes me feel like I belong as a person. Then when half of my team gets injured and it drops to the 1000s, I make excuses for being less of a person.

Of course, these things cannot last. Eventually we learn the system completely, see it as shallow, and move on to something else. Maybe novels, maybe relationships, maybe even random acts of kindness.

All is vanity.

What about the answer to everything in life? God? "Child of God" sounds like a pretty decent identity to me. But how does God validate us? Most of our validation systems work like a simple feedback device--push the button and you get fed. Maybe that's why they're so shallow? But there is no button with God. Is it then possible for Him to validate us?

No answer this time. Just an open question. I can't progress any further rationally at this time, so I must end here. Such a beautiful feeling, this recognition of the shallowness of life, without a solution. Just uncertainty. Simplistic, beautiful, uncertainty. All is vanity.