Becoming the person who does the thing

A somewhat more depressing take: "There comes a time in everyone's life when you look into the mirror and realize that what you see is all that you'll ever be. And you accept that fact - or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors." (Babylon 5, quoted from memory, so probably not 100% correct)

As I'm nearing 30, still in the "I can be anything I want" phase, I wonder when this time will arrive. And whether it is true for everyone - maybe some people possess the ability to reinvent themselves no matter their age. But can you even do that without giving up some contentment?

An unkind answer is these are the sort of navel-gazing observations had by most teenagers, and people in tech are just late bloomers.

But an even less kind answer would be that self-help is big business, and to run the scam you have to build an audience.

True. But it's the same trend in every other field: new born babies lecture soon to die people about life.

Example of such lessons: recently, a well known dating coach who gives lessons that costs around 8000 euros per hour about how a man can become a high value man and attract high value women, called Sadia Khan, proved she is in the position to give lessons about how a woman can be of high value: private calls of her were released recently and it is shown she is a side chick of a married man.

This super-resonates, especially the bit about our actions being a reflection (and being limited by) how we see ourselves and the world in it, the very basic understanding of reality.

For example - I gained a bunch of pounds since my 3rd kid was born - I am busy at work, I try to help my wife as much as I can, the other kids leave no space to work out, whatever. All very realistic and reasonable. And yet I have a neighbor who just had their 3rd kid, he's got a similar caliber job, and I see him running every day. We both "value" being fit, we both understand the connection between exercise and health, we face a similar "objective" reality and yet this is an example where clearly he somehow understands it and himself in it, differently than I do. So for example - consistent with the article - my neighbor probably sees himself as "someone who exercises" and moves the other things around in his life to make it happen. I see myself as someone "who'd like to exercise" - a weaker level of identity that means I don't reshape my reality to make it happen.

Or here's another example - the average religious Jewish couple living in Brooklyn has an average 6.6 kids. A secular couple living in the same zip code is statistically likely to have just about 0 kids. And while there're indeed a million reasons why having kids is very hard today, the religious couple goes into it knowing "we're future parents" and make it happen, the secular couple goes into it "we see the problems facing us" and doesn't make it happen. Same to my exercise example, your interpretation of reality and your role in it, has outsize impact over what externally might seem like identical objective reality.

I am not sure if I believe in objective reality or not. If I do, then people who succeed (eg my fit neighbor, the religious parents) prove what the actual reality is, or whether we each live in our own subjective realities where X is possible for someone as part and parcel of how they are but not for someone else. And when you reframe your reality fully (what religion calls repentance) then you actually do alter it.

I was listening to a book-review podcast that was talking about one of Ernest Cline's books. They were on a section where the 17-year-old protagonist is remarking on how his personality probably reflects his dad's interest in something or other, and one of the hosts laughed and said no 17-year-old does that kind of self-analysis. I immediately said, "Au contraire, maybe you didn't, but plenty of them do." I certainly did.

There may be something about the kind of mind that's drawn to tech that correlates with navel-gazing. We like to know how things work, and that doesn't necessarily only apply to computers and gadgets.

Of course, that only explains why we think about it; not why so many of us write about it like we think other people need to hear it. That probably comes down to being smarter than average and thinking you've got everything figured out by the age of 15, also a common trait of tech people. Fortunately some of us manage to outgrow it and be embarrassed by what know-it-alls we were.