Identity Is Nothing but a Lie

A plain report from inside the unraveling of identity

New Year's Day, 2021

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 perhaps, 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. Advanced geneticists such as David Reich, Craig Venter, Agustín Fuentes, and 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, entirely 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. Loneliness became intolerable. Finally, he drank the new water just to belong again, and went mad. 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 a disguise. It’s not an easy path. You might find yourself friendless. You might 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.