Some sociologists and psychologists label this condition “ontological insecurity.” In The Divided Self, R.D. Laing defines it as when one lacks “the experience of his own temporal continuity” and does not have “an overriding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness.” Without this stable sense of self, Laing argues, every interaction threatens to overwhelm the individual with the fear of losing oneself in the other or of being obliterated by their indifference. “He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable,” Laing writes of the ontologically insecure. “And he may feel his self as partially forced from his body.”
It may not be only depressed people who are tired of having to become themselves
A stable sense of self across time makes life meaningful; it allows us to experience and transmit a sense of “authenticity.” But this stable, authentic self tends to be represented as the means to its own end: You achieve a self by being yourself and finding yourself. This tautology sets us up for failure, and for the endless labor of trying to express and realize ourselves. Sociologist Alain Ehrenberg (in a passage Byung-Chul Han quotes in The Burnout Society) links this burden with the rise of depression as a mental illness: “Depression began its ascent when the disciplinary model for behaviors, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves … The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.”
And the creation of identity in the form of a data archive would seem to fashion not a grounded self but an always incomplete and inadequate double — a “self partially forced from the body.” You are always in danger of being confronted with your incohesiveness, with evidence of a past self now rejected or a misinterpreted, misprocessed version of one’s archive being distributed as the real you.
If Laing is right about ontological insecurity, then social media seem designed to generate it: They systematically impose a sense of insubstantiality on users, turning identity into incoherence by constantly assimilating and demanding more data about us, making our self a vacuum that never fills, no matter how much is poured in. Our identity is constantly being recalibrated and recalculated, and we can forever try to “correct” it with more photos, more updates, more posts, more data.
But this same destabilization opens up the possibility for compensatory reassurances: the serial pleasures of checking for likes and other forms of micro-recognition made suddenly meaningful by the acute insecurity. Even as social media destabilize the lived experience of our self’s continuity, they address the dissolution of identity with a dynamic system of identity capture.
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The profile takes over for the old identity stabilizers (family, geography, religion, etc.) and becomes the sturdy blank slate on which various roles can be inscribed while we remain open to the saturation of as many different influences as possible. It can hold our lives while we are busy constantly reinventing ourselves for labor markets. Social media exacerbate ontological insecurity while masquerading as its cure.