Before we get to the divide, let's look at those two schools of thought. Do people have an authentic inner self or not?

Finding the "Real You"

In "How to Know What You Want When It's Really Hard to Figure That Out," Gage starts off assuming that there really is an inner self we can find. This isn't a small, flexible inner self: it has fully-formed ideas about all sorts of things that you didn't even know you had: "Somewhere, deep down inside. Somewhere, we have preferences, thoughts, wants and needs. Somewhere, we have an opinion on literally anything." That's a whole lot of opinions I didn't know I had. (It's true! I do prefer chocolate to Cambodia!)

People lose touch with that big, complete self, though, when they put the needs of others' before their own:

Empathy and learning to “play well with others” is fine — to an extent. The issue is when it comes time to live self-actualized lives, and we can’t choose between external influences and ourselves.

As straight-forward as this may appear, there are big and complicated assumptions behind it. Gage is saying that there is a real self, with needs and desires of its own, that gets submerged in silence within a socially-created outer self that responds to what others expect,. It's as though the inner self were hidden within a shell formed by other people's agendas.

Is this true?

Do other people have agendas that make our lives more difficult? Absolutely.

Can a person's need to please others prevent them from leading happy, satisfying lives? This is true, too.

Gage explains how she got in touch with her real self: through meditation. Meditative attention became an empowering form of self-awareness that cracked her other-pleasing shell.

There's something appealingly intuitive in this inner-self-outer-self formulation that fits closely with the ways most Americans think about their own beings.

Unfortunately, it raises as many questions as it answers.

First, where would this inner self come from? What is the source of its needs and desires? Were some people born with a need to throw themselves into gardening or playing the piano? Is there a gene for loving curling up with a good book?

As wonderful as these desires are, they can't be innate. They may hook in to basic human capacities to enjoy music or to be satisfied with the quiet success of a growing garden, but these desires must be learned through experience. They're not strictly internal; they connect the stuff of human potential with what people see and learn to appreciate in the world around them. If there is an "inner self," it's too inchoate to guide us without the help of the world around us.

But then, that connects us to the realm of the other-pleasing outer self, and that's where the trouble begins.

There's a second problem as well. I have a friend who once had a bad-tempered tennis partner. When he lost a set he'd whip the ball at the net and smash his racquet against the fence. My friend told him, very politely, that he just wanted to have fun, and having to watch that display whenever he won made him uncomfortable. Could he please turn the negative expression down?

"You mean you don't want me to be myself?" his partner asked.

What's so great about being himself? I asked my friend later. If yourself is so angry and unhappy – and making other people uncomfortable – then maybe being you isn’t always such a wonderful thing.

What if you cracked the shell to reveal your true, inner you, and he turned out to be a putz?

The Flexible You

Rhett Power has a solution to this:

Smart people know that we achieve our best life when we take time to look honestly at who we are and where we are and then make a change.

Most of his advice is intuitive: plan carefully, ask questions, be willing to leave your comfort zone. But other recommendations are a little less obvious: he recommends the "fake it til you make it" method:

Adopt the identity of yourself as someone who has already made the changes you aspire to, and your actions will be those of someone who already made the successful transformation. This, in turn, leads to results in the real world that simply confirm your new reality.

Just practice yourself to a new you. But what about your authentic, essential inner self? It looks as though Power doesn't think you have one – instead, your self is flexible, malleable, able to change to fit your needs.

This is in line with a lot of contemporary psychological thought. It has spawned schools of psychotherapy that suppose changing a person's emotional and behavioral habits can resolve most of their psychological problems.

Can you really change your essential self by changing your outer habits?

Yes and no.

So the evidence from psychotherapy suggests that people can change their identities as Power suggests – but then, of course, it wouldn't be an essential inner self.

This idea raises real problems, though, if we take this to its logical conclusion. In this vision, LGBT people can simply practice themselves out of their orientations and identities, and into a more socially comfortable "normalcy." 

 

So What Are We?

The bulk of the evidence leans more toward Power and the idea of the flexible self and against Gage's vision of a inner self that needs to be heard.[i]

But this picture isn't complete, either.

To get to the bottom of this, we need to move from psychological studies which often look at human minds outside of their cultural contexts, and think about how people fit in to their worlds.

Post-modern thinkers have come to the conclusion that any inner self is going to be a product of external social forces.[ii] Instead of having an inner self with your real personal needs and an outer self that responds to other people, the general consensus is that people have lots of different selves – a variety of values systems, attitudes, and even personality traits that we bring out to fit in with different contexts. The church-you may be different from the work-you, and that may be different from the family-you. Unhappiness isn't a product of a conflict between an inner self and an outer self, but rather between two different selves, or three selves, or more.

Why does it feel like there's an inner self? Some senses of self are deeper, older, and structure thoughts and feelings more often than others – and as a result these can feel like authentic inner selves. And of course, they are real selves – but that doesn't mean that you didn't learn them, or that they didn't come from experience, or that they can't be changed. The is no gene that makes someone love playing the piano – but there are memories of making people happy through music, of the joy of getting it right, of seeking refuge from failures by getting lost in the rhythm, of the sensual pleasure of feeling its vibrations in your chest, of the sense of rightness when the tension in a melody resolves.

At times, senses of self get out of alignment. Jobs that once felt important now feel banal. Youthful philosophies that seemed so good to structure a life around become inconvenient in middle age. This doesn't make them wrong or unreal, but it does mean that it might be time for a change.

So should you just dive in and tinker with your sense of who you are?

Power's recommendations make sense on that front – but he doesn't account for the complications that everyday life presents. Can you take baby-steps toward losing weight? Sure – but it's going to make your life really miserable until you quit that job at the cupcake factory. And what about that deeply-held value, carried over from so many childhoods, that cooking and sharing a rich, delicious meal is a sign of love?

Feeling like a push-over is never good, but at times can be a side-effect of being a kind person. And giving up your penchant toward niceness might cause serious harm to an important sense of self.

What Power says isn’t wrong – but his quick article and its bite-sized pieces of advice make it seem as though we can solve our problems with a little self-discipline. He doesn't recognize that human lives are complex, their many identities entangled and interwoven with one another.

Where does the truth lie?

Our identities are malleable – much more malleable than Gage's essay suggests. We can change ourselves. But because we live our lives connected to other people, and to complex social and cultural worlds, we can't simply snip ourselves out of context, readjust, and reinsert.

The downfall of these approaches has to do with the fact that they both suggest that there are easy fixes for what ails us.

But as we work through our problems, and grow in self-awareness and understanding of other people, maybe the best thing we can do for ourselves is to look for the rough beauty in the complexity, the intensity – and even in the contradictions – of the experience of being alive, and being human.

[i] See, for example Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds by Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner and Cain.

[ii] For a stark explanation of this idea, see Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.