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Comment by geraneum | Hacker News Reader

You might not always have control over what identities you’re attributed to.

For example if you are an immigrant, based on your home country, you may have an identity assigned to you by the destination society even if it isn’t factual. You might ignore it and remind yourself not to care too much about it (try to keep your identity small) but when you have a harder time finding an apartment even when you’re qualified compared to a local, you won’t be able to ignore it anymore. Or if you support a certain president because of economic policy you’re assumed to be racist by some other group of people who might start to treat you like one.

You don’t always have the luxury and I think this is a big point missing from the article.

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To be fair, that's a rather large topic. Not to mention one that PG wouldn't be terribly qualified to answer I don't think.

How do you go about your life knowing that some sizable portion of it identifies you in a way that affects you negatively?

In a minor way I've struggled with this myself over the past few years. Best advice I've come across is to use the stoic dichotomy of control guide me: Some things are in our control, other things are not. Focus on those things you can control. Pay no heed to those you can't. If something seems like a mix of both it can be further broken down into those two.

You don't have to ignore these things. You can acknowledge that they are real and affect you personally, but keep your identity and opinions separate from that. It's the difference between "immigrants tend to have a hard time" vs "white people are trash", or giving preferential treatment to your fellow countryman at work because "it's us against the world".

> You can acknowledge that they are real and affect you personally, but keep your identity and opinions separate from that

I think this is a good way to deal with the issue; they shouldn't be ignored. However it's challenging as you mentioned there are differences. It is not even feasible to merely ignore them if they happen to you and that's exactly my point here. You cannot presumably ignore them and "keep it small" as easily as the author suggests.

Supporting a political candidate is not, in any possible way "similar" to being an immigrant or a child of immigrant parents, as a social identity.

Through my societal lense (as a grandchild of four immigrants) I view similarities, in that: their immigration was a deliberate and drastic choice, one made in response to the perceived inability to influence some desired political change. Often immigration is a follow-up choice due to fear or repricussions from the choice to support a desired political candidate (think political refugees). That being said, people don't typically get to choose the one(s) who parent them.

Edit: I say this as someone who greatly values a culture where social identies are self selected (or nor ;-) as well as mutable.

Of course it's not, and I agree. My intention was to use two different examples to demonstrate that regardless of your background, you might "take on" an identity which you didn't choose and thus cannot "keep it small" as easy as PG suggests.

And even if you do choose your identity, you seldom have the luxury of choosing whether it is controversial or not.

PG has spent the majority of his adult life promoting the "hacker" identity and forming communities for such people. A bit rich for him to tell others to put their identity back into their box because strongly believing in the merits of a particular religious belief, political cause or cultural identity turns out to create more conflict than strongly believing in solving problems with software

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