The built-in Identity Crisis of work-life: How Dante's Inferno got it right

A common way to enter the fire community seems to be to go through some kind of mid-life crisis.

Identity, crisis and burn-out

At the core of the fire community (and mid-life crisis, for that matter) seems to be not finance, but identity. 

What do we mean with that? Let's start by looking at identity. Here's an attempt at a two-fold definition. 

For an individual in relation to a group, identity will be any trait that most sets the individual apart from the  group.

For instance, in a small work place being gay will probably set you apart. Are you among gay friends, being the country boy might set you apart, et cetera.

Inversely, for the individual, identity will be the counteracting trait; anything that includes the person to a group and, importantly, also preferably puts that person higher up in the hierarchy, the status ladder, of that identity-creating group. 

During university and our early careers, we suspect they most high- and medium-achievers are so consumed with an identity based on a strive to find a profession, conforming into a role, that the profession becomes the trait that includes us in a group and sets us apart from other groups. 

Hence profession is a strong candidate to create our identity.

And with identity comes a lot more: the feeling of self-worth, feeling of respect in society and by friends and family and so on and so forth.

If it's not profession, other aspects are likely to compensate for identity: the kids, the house, the husband, friends.

These identities are naturally shallow, and early in life they need to be shallow to guide us into taking concrete, tangible (and by necessity, shallow) action. 

But kids grow up. Work changes and evolves and we become obsolete. The apartment or house as an identity creator? Let's not even go there. 

This early identity, as it's shallow - and society seems to need to keep our identities quite shallow - will eventually hit that trigger event that causes the identity to shatter, and a personal identity crisis will evolve. 

There comes a point when the identity and status in regards to one's chosen group is lost.

But with the identity goes one's feeling of self-worth, respect, belonging and recognition. We're probably hard-wired to react very strongly when that is lost, as this is something that was - and still is - potentially truly dangerous.

This loss of identity is so painful that it needs to be masked in other terms; often given an aura of scientism in the miss-normer of burn-out.

There might be some painful truth here. But in the midst of all ideas around burn-out, identity might often be an unfortunately lost concept.

The Evolutionary Advantage of Burn Out

If a sense of loss of identity wasn't involved, a burnout and the related feeling of stress might be easier to brush off. 

But the loss of identity makes it go deep.

A change in identity is intertwined with a feeling of gliding downward on the hierarchy ladder that our shallow identity is attached to.

Unfortunately for us humans, this seems to have a natural defense system that kicks in, to prevent us from doing dangerous attempts on the hierarchy ladder, as we have failed, or so our evolution tells us. 

There's an obvious evolutionary advantage to avoid further group exclusion. The one that survives, even further down in the group hierarchy, might still be lucky and propagate some more genes, compared to the one that challenges the status ladder and gets killed by the new matriarch, or whatever.

The name of that defense mechanism might very well be depression. Depression seems to be designed to keep us at bay, passively, and consider our options.

Let's sum up: the rules of life forces us to create a guiding identity, that through precisely it's concreteness is shallow and easily scattered, and then makes us fall down the status ladder into burnout and depression.

Is this even designed into the fabric if the human condition in society? This seems to be nothing new. 

Dante's Inferno, which, like the tradition of the alchemists, might have been a way to disguise philosophy and life advice in a religious language acceptable of the age, seems to be one large allegory on this theme, as a symbolic master piece about the midlife crisis and how it affects us and how to get throw it.

As we recall the protagonist's decent starts with:

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Dante et Virgile en enfer
William-Adolphe Bouguereau,1850

The midlife crisis is not just a theme in literature and art, it is also a core idea in individuation: to cast off the limited potential we have forced to constrain ourselves with to fit in society. Which is really nothing else than our constructed, shallow and fragile identity that we need to shake off through the nadir of our life. 

Our ambitions lead us exactly to the point where we do not want to be.

At some point in life, one will discover that what builds our identity isn't as stable and reliable as we hoped, and well, then our identities weren't as reliable and stable as we thought.

And that, not surprisingly as Dante saw, leads to a journey though hell that we must endure to reach heaven.

Conclusion

Here lies part of the beauty with the FIRE-movement. We need to build something more reliable to lean against than an all-too strong identification with things that will be taken away from us. 

Financial independence is a good and important step on that journey.

As long as we needed the paycheck, we are in a sense doomed to struggle with our identity and how it collides with the demands of our profession. 

This kind of identity struggle is not a good foundation to build a new, more free and robust identity upon.

At some point, though, one can become more free, perhaps supported by financial freedom, and start to reinvent the potential one has in life.

As long as that doesn't happen too late.

Farewell.

//antinous&lucilius