Building a self out of stuff doesn't work

I’m a guy in his 30s going through a band t-shirt phase. You can likely make some decent guesses about me as a person based on that.

I’m buying a bounty of band shirts for three reasons. But I don’t like thinking about – or admitting – the third one.

1. I’m going to a lot of gigs this year – especially for local bands I want to support.
2. I like having mementos of those gigs.
3. I kinda want to be known as a “he knows about cool bands” guy.

Reason 3 doesn’t come up often. It’s not a major driver of my buys and literally no-one cares about the shirts I wear. But it’s still there. And I find it a bit embarrassing.¹

How we use objects to make a self

The world is chaotic. It’s full of people doing things and all manner of creatures, critters and climates besides. It can hard to know how to buoy yourself among it all. And what if you want to, in some small way, distinguish yourself?

That’s where objects come in. Countless objects are utilitarian. They just do a job.

But others become a way to define ourselves. They become something more. We choose one thing in particular – at the expense of all others – and that choice becomes a marker of self. It might be something we show to others, it might be something we keep to ourselves.

But the choice, and the object’s stability through time, give us something to hold onto.

Objects ground people

Hannah Arendt – a German philosopher best known for her book The origins of totalitarianism, which everyone bought, opened, read one page and said “okay fuck this” when Donald Trump became US president – wrote an essay called Labor, work, action.

In it, she discusses the difference between different types of human activity. She argues that objects become a key part of how people define themselves:

The things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their identity by being related to the enduring sameness of objects.

“The things of the world” remain the same from day to day and, as such, help anchor us in the face of the ever-changing natural world. They become something we can define ourselves against.

No matter the day, no matter the situation, my band t-shirts are still there. I can always become the “guy in the Cable Ties shirt”, or the guy who splurged on hand-made garden tools, or the guy with HomePod Mini speakers in every room in the house.

Ultimately, though, the identity cobbled together using those things is just as dynamic and changing as nature itself. Any sense of stability is an illusion. And trying to hold onto that stability is doomed to fail.

But the self isn’t real

That’s because there’s no real “self” to be stable. The consistent sense of self you have is an illusion. Here’s how Alan Watts, one of the philosophers who helped popularise Buddhism in the west, described the self in his book The way of zen:

For the conventional “self” or “person” is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the “real” me than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is!

He goes on to explain that it’s “fundamental to every school of Buddhism that there is no ego, no enduring entity which is the constant subject of our changing experiences.” Ego, he says, is just an “abstraction from memory.”

“The point,” according to Watts, “is that there is no Self, or basic reality, which may be grasped, either by direct experience or by concepts. The Buddha’s view was that a Self so grasped was no longer the true Self. Any attempt to conceive the Self, believe in the Self, or seek the Self immediately thrusts it away.”

We’re not one thing from beginning to end. We’re constantly changing, buffeted and shaped by everyone and everything around us (all of which is also shaped by others). We’re a confluence of countless moments. We’re attention and interaction. We’re fleeting.

We’re a confluence of events

The Sri Lankan monk Walpola Rahula digs into this idea in his seminal book about Theravada Buddhism called What the Buddha taught:

What we call a “being”, or an “individual”, or “I”, according to Buddhist philosophy, is only a combination of ever-changing physical and mental energies, which may be divided into five groups or aggregates.

The five aggregates are:

1. The aggregate of matter, which includes our five sense-organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body) and the “corresponding objects in the world”.
2. The aggregate of sensations, which covers all our sensations experienced as our physical and mental abilities interact with the world.
3. The aggregate of perceptions, which recognise physical and mental objects.
4. The aggregate of mental formations, including all our volitional activities. This covers everything we decide to do – our will, attention, determination, and more.
5. The aggregate of consciousness, defined by Rahula as “a reaction or response which has one of the six faculties (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind) as its basis, and one of the six corresponding external phenomena (visible form, sound, odour, taste, tangible things and mind-objects, i.e., an idea or thought) as its object. Consciousness is connected with our other faculties – not something that stands alone.

What we think of as a self or “I” is, according to Rahula, “a convenient name or label given to the combination of these five groups. They are all impermanent, all constantly changing.” But, when they’re all working together, the five aggregates feel like a persistent self.

Of course, each aggregate interacts with the world and the myriad of people in it. We’re not just shaped by our own actions – everyone we meet (and millions we don’t) shape us well. We’re interconnected beings trying to hold onto something stable. Something that feels like “me”.

Here’s how Arendt put it in the lecture we spoke about earlier:

All human activities are conditioned by the fact of human plurality, that not one man, but men in plural inhabit the earth and in one way or another live together. But only action and speech relate specifically to this fact, to live always means to live among men, among those who are my equals. Hence, when I insert myself into the world, it is a world where others are already present.

My attempt to slap a band shirt on the tossed salad of selfhood is, ultimately, doomed to struggle. It’s an attempt to hold onto one part of my past – that I went to a gig and bought a shirt – and make it an ongoing now so that other people see it and think “damn, that guy’s something”.

We’re not objects

Let’s bring things together.

We’re all a hodgepodge of experiences, sensations and thoughts. When they’re acting together, they create the sensation of a solid, stable self. We look into the past and use that to create a neat little narrative for ourselves, forged from memories we select, and that helps prop up our selfhood.

But nature is unrelenting. It’s changing moment to moment and, year, we know it. Things and objects, though, they stay the same. So we reach for them to anchor us – to give us a sense of self. And, as an added bonus, they help communicate our self-ness to the world at large.

Look at me, I’m wearing a Gut Health shirt – they’re a band I like and I’ve seen them live. (I also spend a weird amount of time worrying about my microbiome and whether I can stomach dairy, but the shirt isn’t specifically about that.)

None of this is a problem, necessarily. The language of self is a useful shorthand for the wildly complicated ideas that go into our feeling of selfhood. No-one wants to go around referencing aggregates when they’re trying to explain who they are.

But you can run into problems when you try to cling to that illusory self and think it permanent. When you start to define yourself by the things you own or consume because they’re the most readily available way to stabilise yourself in a world moving around you.

The band shirts aren’t the problem. At least that’s what I tell myself: I’ll probably buy one at another gig soon.