Unselfing: holding our identities lightly

Social media is an echo-machine that validates without transformation. hashta..The compulsion to constantly publish, check or like posts is not just personal failing; the "like-economy" reorganises desire toward recognition, entailing structural entrapment and the corruption of practice through a systematic subordination of internal goods to external ones. As Han suggests, it produces subjects that enthusiastically self-exploit for achievement, combining Bourdieu’s illusio with Lacan's objet petit a, much to the pleasure of tech feudalists.

The popular response—the psychology toolkit—is often complicit. We turn inward to increase emotional resilience. But genuine attention requires dissolution of self; kenosis is not mindfulness. Sinek's "authentic purpose" presupposes the self as primary; IDGs optimise skills without telos; Sen's capabilities expand the menu while refusing the meal. None can ask the most relevant question: not WHAT one is, but WHO one becomes—Ricoeur’s idem vs ipse. Such inquiry is structurally unavailable to any method that refuses goods exceeding the self.

Spiritual methods fail elsewhere. Theory U’s "emerging future" and westernised versions of indigenous traditions rely on metaphysical immanentism and neglect the political nature of society. Aristotle was precise: the polis is not context but condition of possibility. The question of who one becomes is inseparable from the institutional arrangements under which becoming is possible. Shareholder primacy, the attention economy, the flaws of democracy: power structures do not yield to mere contemplation, regardless of how many leaders presence. This is not a moral failure; it's an ontological one.

My ascetic "unselfing" is philosophical, not psychological. It doesn't merely raise a question about social media, but about work as such: whether our professional practice forms subjects capable of wisdom, or merely reproduces a system that no longer requires it.

Hence, it is never enough to “go on the balcony” or “stop the downloading”. A good life requires moral positioning through praxis; it is not just consciousness, but methexis—participation in what Taylor calls a moral horizon, a non-arbitrary ordering of goods. Our life is structurally conditioned, reflexively mediated, and meaningful only within a Good that remains irreducibly beyond the self.

To hold identity lightly then is not relativism, but "epektasis"—the infinite movement toward a Good that always exceeds us. It is the daily discipline of linking personal becoming to care for the other and justice of the whole. Without it, our selves are not just imprisoned, but without weight.

So, today, I return to writing as "hypomnemata": I don't write because I have thoughts—or to earn likes, or to feel authentic; I become because I write.