Everyone seems to have it figured out. They know who they are, where they’re going, and what they want to achieve in life.

But that’s mainly a mirage. Most people actually have no idea what they are doing or where they are going. That’s because they haven’t stepped outside their social circles and culture and had a good think about it.

Societal Programming

Societies program individual human beings from an early age. Other people constantly tell us who we are and, over time, we believe them. Children come to think of themselves as “smart”, “good-looking,” “resilient,” “pathetic”, “liars,” and “morons.” These then percolate into the unconscious programming, literally telling us how to act, feel and behave in various situations. We can’t escape the Matrix.

You can see how deeply this programming goes with a simple thought experiment. Imagine you are walking through the forest and you have never met, seen, or heard of another human being. How would you feel? It’s hard to say. You wouldn’t have any language because you’ve never met anyone else. You wouldn’t have any way to structure your thoughts. You also wouldn’t know anything about your identity. That’s because there would be no others you could compare yourself against. Male or female, old or young, short or tall: you’d have no idea.

You’d also struggle to think about the past and future. You might have a concept that something happened before and that something different might occur in the future. But it wouldn’t be bound up by cultural detritus, like time, calendars, and work schedules.

This thought experiment is interesting because it reveals a mental landscape civilization denies us. Modern humans are like ticker tape, ready to be fed into the machine. We have no idea what life feels like in the primordial state. We can’t sense it at all. We’re not supposed to.

Why Workers Can’t Figure Out Who They Are

This issue might be at the root of why it is so difficult for workers to accurately assess who they are. Even when they get right down into the bowels of their personalities, they don’t know how much of themselves is authentic, and how much is other people. In the most pessimistic assessments, our mental landscapes are almost entirely populated by the furniture of others. There’s hardly any room left for our authentic selves at all.

At this juncture, you have two options. You can either believe that there is something called the authentic self, or you can view the human personality as a mirror that reflects the social world. If the former is true, it means that there is a person to recover (or something down there at least). But if there isn’t, it means that individuals don’t really exist. The human personality is an echo chamber with no originality to be found, no matter how meticulously you probe it.

Going back to our thought experiment, the former is more true than the latter. There have been human beings throughout history who lived alone and rarely if ever, came into contact with others. And these people seem to have their own personalities, less informed by the social world than anyone else.

What’s interesting about these people is the extreme alienness of their experiences. Those in the wilds of the Amazon, for instance, don’t flinch at the thought of murder. For them, it’s self-protection and it seems entirely natural. Others cannot understand the Western world and all its dysfunction at all. The idea that people would go to work, let alone exercise, seems laughable. Once you have a full belly, what else do you need?

Can You Recover Your True Self?

So what are western people in regular jobs supposed to do: Give it all up and return to the rainforest?

Unfortunately, not even that strategy will work. Spending time alone in nature will only partially deprogram the mind. It can’t return to its original blank slate.

The trick here is to take intellectual and spiritual shortcuts. Going to a career assessment site and taking various tests can help you find out who you are at the most basic level, and what you should be doing with your time.

Carl Jung’s division of the personality across various dimensions, later refined by Myers-Brigg, was a stroke of genius. He saw that human beings navigated the world in different ways and that you could distinguish these from each other quite predictably. These were the basic tenets of personality, as far as he could understand them.

But this structure was only the tip of the iceberg. For instance, many people wind up as introverts precisely because of the people around them. Spending time with them is painful, so they retire. In a different life with different circumstances, they could have been a different way.

That’s where the spiritual side of true self-recovery emerges. This strategy goes beyond conventional psychology and asks what the nature of consciousness itself is. It suggests that it’s a void or “pure awareness,” devoid of the ego. There’s something right at the base of being that nobody is talking about.

If recovering the true self is possible, it probably starts here. It’s the blank slate that was there when you first emerged from the womb. And it’s probably the one you’ll go back to when your life is over.

Finding Out Who You Are

Finding out who you are requires abandoning the social detritus lodged in your mind and going back to the source. The ancient Daoist sages called it the “fasting of the heart.”

The ironic aspect of this process is that, at the end of it, you may discover that there isn’t anything there after all. You try to probe what you are, but you find no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Interestingly, though, if that happens, you’re probably on the right track. Practically all of the great saints and sages had similar experiences. For them, it wasn’t about having a big personality. Jesus didn’t do the conga. Instead, it was having a big presence. Everyone knows about it when you enter the room.