Comment by Xurinos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xurinos | Hacker News Reader

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For now, you are what you do.

Gonna heavily disagree with this one... This is an attitude that turns us into machines with expected outputs rather than people. We humans spend a lot of time limiting ourselves by placing labels on ourselves and limiting our perceptions by labeling others.

Discard the labels. Do not try to fit a role. You might program computers, but you are not a programmer. You fly planes, but you are not an aviator. You play a guitar, but you are not a musician. You teach, but you are not a teacher. All these terms have extra connotations we have all built up.

Your footprint on the world is a culmination of your actions, so in a sense, your actions mark you in the perceptions of others. However, as we humans are so adaptable, we can discard the notion of who we think we are and start afresh, always pick new directions. We do not have to be what we have been, and we do not have to cater to what other people expect of us.

Just because you get a college degree in X and work 30 years in X does not mean you cannot ever do Y; that is a self-imposed limitation reinforced by the X label.

Purpose of life? To live. Nice and fundamental. Meaningless enough to show you that you can do about whatever you want if you have the interest and make the effort. Limitless enough to give hope that if, in your 20s, you feel you are not doing what you want, you can try something else.

No, you are not what you do. You are you. What you do is what you have chosen to do at that time. It is okay to change, okay to do the unexpected, okay to break out of your comfort zone and whatever comfort zones and roles that TV and society have tried to impose upon you.

I think you've misunderstood the comment. It isn't, "You are one single thing you've done." It's "You are what you do." If you paint, you're a painter. If you raise children, you're a parent. If you hack, you're a hacker.

They're not mutually exclusive: You might be a hacker-painter-parent. You can keep adding roles as long as you have time to do things. They're also not necessarily permanent: You can stop being a hacker if you don't like hacking anymore. But if you don't do any of those actions, you aren't any of the accompanying things.

No, I am not what I do. I do many things. If you (the general populace) must label me, just call me Xurinos. Better, call me the Xurinos that posts on HN. You use labels to conveniently understand me, but that is going to lead to mistakes and misunderstandings, broken expectations. Those are your chosen limitations.

My point is to discard the label/role from your thinking because it can lock you in place. Multiple roles suffer the same problem as singular roles in that the name has boundaries. It is harder to see where the lines blur (the shades of gray) because you have lines. Looking for the blur in the first place is a sign that you have accepted an arbitrary label with its connotations and are trying to climb your way out of that casting.

This is an example of where the language itself limits you. You hack, so you are a hacker. But "hacker" does not just mean "one who hacks". It might also make you think of Jolt. :)

The danger is when you start to mold your identity to fit in with the group that shares that label. Do you own a t-shirt that talks about your love of hackerdom? "10 kinds of people understand binary"? If you make it part of who you are, then you will find it more difficult to change.

There are several kinds of situations where this identity labeling makes someone feel trapped or slows them down. If you have never intimately known or been yourself suicidal (and managed to recover from it), for example, you would see that part of the problem is an inability to change, a clinging to the past, to an identity. Others and I were trying to eliminate that identity. We had to change in order to continue living. A similar problem exists for job loss.

Another way to look at this is to consider your choices. When your choices conflict with your identity, you have run into one of those labeling conflicts.

No you have missed the point, and out of all the comments, I can't let this mistake go. You make the decisions to do what you want to do, and those decisions -- what you do, your decisions -- is the essence of your existence.

Every minute you make new choices, do new things, and those choices and actions are your life. The things you do, the decisions and actions you take, even if nothing more than decisions to be happy under miserable circumstances, constitute your life. You own them, and by continuing to take ownership and dancing above the chasm, you live fully.

We must imagine Sisyphus happy.

We may have to disagree, then. Here is our common ground from my first post: "Your footprint on the world is a culmination of your actions, so in a sense, your actions mark you in the perceptions of others." But clinging to what you think you are based upon actions you have performed will hold you back from living. The distinctions may be subtle, but there is a kind of freedom involved here.

But clinging to what you think you are based upon actions you have performed will hold you back from living

Yes. And this is why "clinging to what you think you are based upon actions you have performed" is an exceptionally _bad_ way to make decisions and do things. Do not do this.

You are adding in a past-tense here where none is intended. You are alive this instant. You make decisions. This is your life. There is nothing in this advice about thinking you are the culmination of past decisions. You are alive now. You make decisions now. The decisions you make right now are your life.

The things you may or may not have not done in the past have nothing at all to do with it. In fact, as you point out, if you define yourself by your past actions? You've missed the point of what I was saying.

You are your decisions, but you are not the history of your decisions. You are your present-tense decisions. You exist now -- not as some trend, pattern, or tendency. People can worry about history when you are dead if they like. It's not worth your time now. Your life is the decision you make right this instant.

We are not disagreeing. I believe you misunderstand.

Ooo, we're on the same page now, and I agree with you. :)

Great comment, thanks.

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