This line came out of a moment in chapter 22 of 30 Philosophers where I wanted to distill a big philosophical idea into something honest and human. We talk about identity as if it’s solid and easy to define, but the truth is… it isn’t. We’re constantly changing. Growing. Contradicting ourselves. And if we’re being real, most of us only half-understand who we are at any given moment.
Writing about Descartes made this even clearer to me. Here’s a man trying to rebuild knowledge from the ground up, starting with the “I.” But even he couldn’t fully pin down what the “I” was. So I leaned into that uncertainty. The phrase “whatever that is” isn’t self-doubt — it’s self-honesty. It’s permission to be a work in progress.
And this matters because identity is the starting point for everything else — our worldview, our beliefs, our sense of meaning. When you allow your identity to be flexible, you create space for growth. You let yourself evolve instead of defending an outdated version of you. That’s the heart of my worldview: identity isn’t a fixed object; it’s an ongoing story, one we get to keep rewriting.