Cached identities

James Clear talks about changing your identity as a way to change your habits. It’s hard to eschew meat every time you go out to eat, but once you label yourself as “someone who doesn’t eat meat”, and start to believe it, then it becomes easy not to order it.

Identities let you precompute actions

There are two reasons this is useful. One is that adopting an identity lets you have a quick heuristic for testing whether you should or shouldn’t do something.

Being a “vegetarian” or “vegan” is useful in this way – it’s easier to just have the identity and then infer what you can do from it. It’s cognitively much more demanding to be some other more niche thing, like a lacto-vegetarian who makes an exception for eggs from your neighbour’s chickens. Like an act utilitarian, you have to constantly evaluate each relevant action – does this fit with my specific dietary rules? – which is just too draining to keep up.

Having a simple identity, much like having rules for yourself, removes all this cognitive load. It also makes your policy on e.g. eating animal products much more legible to others.

Identities let you take yourself seriously

In some cases, labelling yourself as the thing is enough to be the thing. Anyone can be a ‘startup founder’ – you just need to have an idea for something that will make money and then attempt to do it. Arguably you’re a founder before you even incorporate your business. There’s also not really an official on-ramp to becoming a founder; you just start doing it. So adopting the identity is half the battle.

Likewise, being a ‘runner’ – you just need to run. You label yourself, and if you aren’t doing the thing you notice the discrepancy and hopefully start directing yourself to resolve it.

Identities make change daunting

It’s possible that the same thing that makes this mental trick work can also make it fail. Oliver Burkeman talks about the dangers of becoming a ‘meditator’. What then? Scheduling a ten minute session of meditation feels like weaseling – you’re a real serious meditator now, and such a person would be doing an hour a day, every day, right?

You end up not meeting your own standard and failing with abandon. A better idea would be to simply drop the identity and do the smallest possible thing you can towards your goal, which ultimately is what someone with that identity would do anyway.

Goodharting on your goals

And then there are ways in which having an identity traps you. Maybe you want to sleep with more people (feel free to substitute for “read more books” or “visit more countries” if you prefer). But that alone doesn’t fully describe what you actually want; yes, you might want more casual sex, but you probably have a much more complex set of desires which are difficult to capture. You might want to eventually find a long-term partner so need to be on the lookout for someone who’s compatible. Perhaps you want to build a closer bond with a specific person you come across, rather than just seeking out one-night stands. Maybe there are times where, actually, you’d prefer to just be single and not bother with any of it.

Once you lock in your identity, you see everything through that lens. You’ve precomputed your actions to fit a narrow utility function. And so now you start doing things which locally satisfy the constraint of your self-declared identity, but which are globally self-defeating.

You opt to go on a date with a new person instead of seeing someone you quite like already and having what is probably ultimately a better time. Or you force yourself to go on dates when really you know you’d rather be at home.

Sometimes this can be useful – we’ve all needed to push past the resistance to going to the gym on a rainy evening when you’d prefer to be in the warm. Being someone who exercises daily can be helpful here. But sometimes pushing past those desires because we’ve adopted a specific identity, because we’re slavishly pursuing some goal, can be self-defeating.

This way of thinking about and motivating oneself can lead to something like a cached identity. You continue doing the thing you think you want because you decided, some time ago, that this who you want to be, and so you adopted those desires as an identity.

You find out five years down the line, after moulding your actions around being someone who is into the outdoors, or someone who has lots of hobbies, that you forgot what you actually like and filled your life with stuff that serves some past version of you that thought this was what you were supposed to want.

You might, in fact, realise that you actually hate the thing you’ve adopted as an identity. The player who trawls dating apps for a new notch, forgetting that each encounter leaves him feeling hollow. The traveller who’s visited ninety countries – with all of the ensuing expense, stress, time spent in airports and on planes – but not been to any of them twice. The founder on his fourth company, who only really wanted to build one good thing.

After years of going to the gym to lift weights, using tools like Beeminder to punish myself when I didn’t go (and paying them a bunch of money in the process), I realised I actually hated going. The joy I used to feel doing Stronglifts when I was eighteen in the deserted weights room of my local gym – not really knowing what I was doing but loving learning the skill and seeing progress – was now gone. I needed to accept that instead of finding various creative ways to beat myself back into enjoying it.

I switched to Barry’s instead.