Identity Is Nothing but a Lie
A plain report from inside the unraveling of identity
Let’s be honest about loneliness. It isn’t just a lack of company or a bout of melancholy. It’s the lived fact that no one—not even those closest to us—will ever fully know what we’ve seen, suffered, or felt. This is not some personal defect or passing emotional phase. It’s structural. Even in the middle of a crowd, we remain alone in our own perceptual field—our own world.
When I say "our world," I don’t mean a private planet. I mean that each of us filters experience through the peculiar architecture of our own minds. Our presence brings our world into being. We don’t see reality. We see what we see. There is no such thing as objective consciousness. It has the ontological status of a unicorn: imaginable, but not real.
Loneliness, then, is the price of awakeness. It’s what we face when we stop clutching second-hand notions—religion, nationalism, spiritual slogans, gender banners, racial labels—and instead meet the terrifying fact that we don’t actually know who or what we are. But once we admit that we don’t know, we’re finally being honest. And without honesty, there’s no freedom.
Much of what we call identity is a way to wallpaper over this original solitude. We bind ourselves to race, gender, class, nation, fandom—not because we are those things, but because identifying "as" something feels like belonging. Like we’ve found our tribe. But to identify "as" is to enter a fiction. Our true identity is this aliveness, this capacity to be aware. Everything else is costume.
Race, for example, has no biological basis. The most advanced geneticists—David Reich, Craig Venter, Agustín Fuentes, Adam Rutherford—all agree: there’s no genetic sequence that makes someone "Black" or "White." There’s more genetic variation within sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the world combined. Race is a social construct—a powerful one, yes, with brutal consequences—but a fiction all the same. To say someone is "Black" or "White" is to participate, often unconsciously, in linguistic racism. It reinforces the very divisions we claim to oppose.
I’m not saying racism isn’t real. It is. Brutal and ongoing. And I’m not suggesting we ignore history. But when we internalize racial categories as personal identities, we perpetuate the lie. The way out isn’t to flip the script. It’s to exit the theater.
Same with gender. Human experience has always overflowed the binaries, but replacing biology entirely with identification loses the plot. Denying the body—hormones, chromosomes, the material substrate—and replacing it with endlessly mutable self-labels is fiction. Some people genuinely don’t fit neatly into male or female, and that’s fine. But gender cannot be whatever anyone says it is, detached from biology, and still remain coherent.
This does not mean I’m dismissing the struggles of those who feel marginalized. I understand why people cling to identity—for protection, community, and some sense of dignity in a society that so often withholds it.
One of the latest trends is identifying as anti-materialist, replacing naturalism with metaphysical speculation about consciousness as the primary reality. Thinkers like Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup say the physical world is just a projection of mind. These ideas wear scientific clothing but are stitched from assertion, not evidence. They appeal to those tired of materialism’s cold rigor, offering a kind of spiritualized certainty—consciousness without content, mind without matter. But this, too, can become just another belief system, another mask. To identify as an anti-materialist is often just another refusal to live with not-knowing. And that refusal, like any other, shuts the door. Awake means open, without rushing to wrap things up.
A Sufi parable tells of a man who stockpiled water after being warned that all future water would induce madness. When the rains returned, the rivers flowed again, and everyone drank—and went mad. The man, still sane, found himself alone. Finally, he drank the new water just to belong again. That’s what many of us do. We’d rather be mad together than alone in clarity.
Awakening is the refusal to drink. It’s the choice to live without refuge in race, gender, religion, politics, or metaphysical identity.
Awake doesn’t mean that suffering vanishes. It means meeting suffering without disguise. It’s not an easy path. You may find yourself friendless. You may feel the wind blow through the hole where identity used to be. But in that emptiness, something else becomes possible: a direct, unfiltered encounter with what is. No names. No masks. No certainties. Just aliveness.
That is what I mean by awake. That is what I mean by Depending On No-Thing.
Yes. I am in London at the moment and it's been a beautiful warm spring day here. I went to a remarkable exhibition at The Tate Modern; humans expressing ourselves in the midst of our certain march towards desolation. Joy inside the pain. As we left there were a group of scientolgists and a group of Christians selling their wares: humans bonding around the magical stories we tell around the fire as the hyenas howl in the distance.
I loved this article, and the last two paragraphs are great! Yes!!!
A few minor points I'd question on race and gender, although I'm basically in agreement with your perspective on both.
On race, I wouldn't say race is entirely a social construct, although some of it certainly is. But there are obvious physical differences in such things as skin color, facial structure, shapes of various facial features, body size, and increased susceptibility to certain diseases. So there are racial differences and to deny them seems absurd to me. Color-blindness (the approach to racism favored by MLK, Coleman Hughes, myself and many others) doesn't mean denying that race exists. It means that race shouldn't matter in how one is treated in society.
And on gender, I continue to distinguish biological sex from gender. Biological sex is, by most accounts, binary, with only occasional intersex anomalies or exceptions. But if gender refers to masculinity and femininity, these are obviously in large part social constructs (although not entirely, imo), and there is clearly a wide spectrum of gender variance between different cultures and in terms of how people in general feel, dress and act in terms of masculinity and femininity. But I completely agree that "endlessly mutable self-labels is fiction" and that one can't simply self-identify as the opposite sex and thus become the opposite sex.
Finally, in my experience, there was a time and place where identifying with a particular group (in my case, women, lesbians, people with disabilities) and talking amongst ourselves was helpful in terms of recognizing the particular kinds of social prejudice we faced and organizing to change it. It was helpful, and then at another point, it wasn't. We clung to it in unhelpful ways. Along similar lines, I fully supported affirmative action for many decades as a kind of "necessary evil" to help undo racism, and then, I was happy when the Supreme Court overturned it recently. I thought it was time. So identity can be a tricky thing. But generally, nowadays for sure, I feel that the emphasis on identity politics is very misguided and is making things worse not better.
Anyway, great article. ❤️🙏