Notes from the essay The Post-Individual by Yancey Strickler
- the shift from “who am I?” to “who all am I?”
- For most of human history, identity was given to you — by family, by geography, by blood. Then individualism said: no, you get to decide who you are. That felt like freedom. And it was, for a while. But it also quietly became its own trap — the pressure to self-actualize, to have a coherent brand of yourself, to be a legible, singular person.
- “isolated, shrink-wrapped humans ready to self-actualize with each purchase.”
“We’re in the midst of a significant evolution in what it means to be an individual. This experience and confluence of forces is what I call post-individualism — a term intended to capture the ways computers and the web have changed our sense of self and how society is changing in response.”
“As Christianity spread over the next thousand years, spiritual equality and, along with it, individualism did too. Around 1000 A.D., Christian churches pushed individualism from the spiritual to the physical. Leaders of the Catholic Church, potentially intending to break the clan-based power that dominated their parishes in Southern Europe, issued a decree: it was forbidden for first cousins to marry.”