Maybe ‘Know Thyself’ Was Never Advice but a Warning

Or, the more we know who we are, the less room there is to become

There’s a strange kind of peace that comes from admitting you don’t know who you are. Not in the adolescent, identity-crisis way—but in the calm, adult sense of realising that not knowing is, perhaps, the natural state.

A tree doesn’t know it’s a tree; it simply reaches for the light. Maybe we were designed for direction, not definition.

The problem began the moment we mistook self-description for self-knowledge. Somewhere between the Renaissance and LinkedIn, between Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and Instagram’s “I post, therefore I exist,” we began treating identity as a deliverable—something to refine, brand, and present to the world for validation.

We became our own publicists, and, like all publicists, we started believing our press releases.

It’s efficient, of course. The world rewards clarity, even when it’s false. “The designer.” “The gym guy.” “The one who always has a plan.” Labels make coordination easier. The ancient Greeks carved their heroes in marble precisely because marble doesn’t change shape. Consistency is civilisation’s lubricant. But what makes societies stable often makes individuals brittle.

A big identity feels solid—anchored, reassuring—but it’s also a leveraged position. The more you invest in a single version of yourself, the more you must protect it from volatility. And life, inconveniently, is volatility itself. So we defend, rationalise, edit. We begin writing for reputation instead of curiosity, speaking to maintain coherence instead of truth. The good person stops experimenting with mischief; the serious person forgets how to play. What starts as integrity ends as inertia.

The irony is exquisite: the more we know who we are, the less room there is to become.

I learned this accidentally. I once decided to write lowbrow romance novels under a fake name. For fun. No pressure, no “voice.” I never completed one to publish, but I realised something valuable in the process. The sentences wandered; they didn’t sound like me. Or rather, they sounded like a version of me I didn’t realise was possible. It was liberating, and slightly humiliating, to realise how many things I’d stopped doing not because I disliked them, but because they didn’t “fit.”

That experiment taught me something simple but sticky: a small identity has large permission. When the stakes are low, curiosity breathes again. It’s easier to throw a stone into a river when you don’t care if it skips.

Identity, I realised, behaves like a portfolio. You need a few stable holdings—the roles that pay rent, raise children, keep promises—but the rest should be options: cheap, reversible experiments that can fail without wrecking your balance sheet. The investor who never rebalances goes broke in silence. The person who never revises does the same. Optionality is curiosity with a safety net.

Of course, freedom attracts its own costs. You can’t be fluid in a world built for solid people. Friends like you better when they can name you; companies promote you when they can predict you. Even the ancient Stoics, who distrusted attachment, carved their virtues into tablets. Ambiguity makes for poor social glue.

There are mornings I wake up and feel like vapour—capable of becoming anything, but not quite solid enough to hold. It can be a little unsettling. Because identity isn’t just a prison; it’s also a home.

Psychologists call this the exploration–exploitation trade-off. Too much stability, and you stagnate. Too much exploration, and you dissipate. The trick is rotation, not balance. Inhale, exhale. Commit, then wander.

It’s the same rhythm nature uses: seasons of structure followed by seasons of change. The challenge is remembering which season you’re in. When the system locks into perpetual summer, it forgets how to adapt. So do we.

Maybe that’s why I’ve grown fond of what I used to call “naughtiness.” I don’t mean malice; I mean curiosity that refuses to obey. The heretic, the hacker, the child drawing outside the lines—they’re not trying to burn the system down; they’re poking holes to let light in.

Civilisation depends on these gentle vandals. You can’t be naughty with a heavy identity; it won’t bend. To play, you must travel light.

Still, I wouldn’t romanticise fluidity. Too much motion, and you dissolve into ambiguity. There’s comfort in a tent, but you can’t live in it through every storm. Stability is underrated. Anchors are what make exploration possible in the first place. The trick is not to confuse the anchor for the ocean.

Certainty feels good. It makes introductions easier, mornings cleaner. But every certainty carries maintenance costs. You start defending your idea of yourself instead of testing it. You stop evolving to stay consistent. The Stoics might have said, “Know thyself.” Maybe that was never advice. Maybe it was a warning.

So I’ve started treating my selfhood like a camping tent—light enough to carry, sturdy enough to rest in, easy to fold when the wind shifts. It’s a home, not a monument. You can set it up anywhere, sleep under the stars, and pack it by morning. I like that image because it admits fragility without surrendering to it.

I like to think the universe rewards the small-hearted experimenters—the ones who try, fail, and try again without turning their failures into identities. Maybe that’s the best any of us can do: keep throwing stones into rivers, not to prove who we are, but to see what patterns the ripples make.