“Be yourself” is the biggest piece of chicken soup wisdom of this era, and also the most harmful one. Because it is built on a premise that simply does not hold up:
that you have a self waiting to be found.
The problem is, for 99.99% of people today, there is no self at all. So how are you supposed to “be yourself”?
Why is there no self?
Because after decades of being domesticated by the system, that self was either strangled to death, or never even got the chance to grow in the first place.
The self you think you have is actually a compensation built out of three layers of shells wrapped around each other.
The first layer is the shell of parental expectations.
You have to be sensible, you have to get good grades, you have to find a stable job.
This is the factory default etched onto you by bloodline.
The second layer is the shell of school discipline.
You have to obey the rules, you have to have the standard answer, you have to climb upward in the ranking system.
This is the steel stamp the education assembly line puts on you.
The third layer is the shell shaped by companies and platforms.
You have to be execution-oriented, you have to manage upward, you have to align at the right level of granularity.
This is the runtime plugin the business machine installs on you.
This is your first half of life.
You have lived for twenty or thirty years wearing these three layers of shells, you have gotten used to their existence, and you have even mistaken these three layers of shells for yourself.
Now, you suddenly decide to “find your true self,” and start peeling away these shells. You think that inside there will jump out a dazzling, powerful “true self.”
In the end, all you find inside is emptiness. There is no true self waiting to be released at all.
This explains a very common phenomenon:
why do so many people, after quitting their jobs without a plan, not only fail to get the freedom they imagined, but instead become more anxious than ever before?
Because when they were in the company cursing the boss and the system, at least they still had the identity of a “victim” to confirm their existence.
Once they leave the system, no one is assigning them tasks, no one is setting goals for them, and no one is paying them anymore.
They suddenly have to face that vast emptiness.
It’s not that freedom is bad, it’s that they were simply not prepared to handle freedom.
They have no “self” to live as.
After the system is stripped away, they lose the operating system for life, and can only lie in bed until noon, consumed by emptiness.
The truth is brutal:
freedom requires an extremely high capacity to bear it, and a person without a concrete “self” will be crushed by freedom.
Since looking inward is a dead end, what should we do?
The newtype answer is: do not look inward, build outward.
The logic of everyone else is that the “self” is an a priori existence. It has long been hidden deep in your soul; you just need to awaken it, realize it, discover it.
This is a classic religious logic.
But the newtype logic is that the “self” is something constructed after the fact. It does not exist at the beginning. You need to build it piece by piece through continuous action and feedback, like stacking blocks.
This is pure engineering logic.
In other words, the self is not discovered; it is defined in reverse by what is produced.
First comes output, then comes the self.
But there is a trap here that many people never notice.
Who gave you the material in your head?
Still those three layers of shells.
Family tells you what success means; school tells you what correctness means; companies tell you what value means.
If you use this set of materials to produce output, what you produce is still a shell, not you.
So, in order to define and nurture a “true self” through output, you need new input, you need to reinstall your cognition.
First recognize the “standard answers” preinstalled in those three layers of shells.
This step may require introspection. Because it is really not easy to identify a path you have been used to for twenty years.
My own experience is that after learning to observe my thoughts, I could perceive my state at the very first moment, as well as the reason that caused that state; I knew what kind of behavior I was about to take, and the deep reason that triggered that behavior.
It was as if there were a me in a third-person perspective, watching how “I” was being manipulated by everything.
After recognition comes input.
You need to take in a large amount of heterogeneous material. For example, history, political economy, philosophy, psychology, and content about first principles. These are not skill books, they are worldview books.
The key is not to read a lot, but to read differently.
Be sure to deliberately read things that make you uncomfortable, things that shake your old beliefs.
When you finish reading and feel that something has loosened, then that is right.
The goal of this step is only one: to install a new explanatory framework in the brain.
With a new framework, you can start using it.
Use the new framework to explain the people, events, news, and your own past that you see. Then write it out, publish it, make it real.
Bravely accept feedback from reality. Turn the framework in your head into something that can be tested. See which explanations hold up, which are slapped in the face, and which make your eyes light up and keep you from stopping.
The place that makes your eyes light up is the place where you are growing.
Input and output are like two loops, interlocking with each other.
New things you take in must be digested through output. If you read a good book and do not write it out, three months later there will be nothing left.
When you hit a blockage in output, go back and deliberately take in related material. If you get stuck writing at a certain point, it means there is a cognitive hole there waiting for you to fill it.
The two loops drive each other, and a person slowly grows within this cycle.
Stop either loop, and the self stops growing.
This is not a methodology I worked out by deduction. It is the path I myself walked.
Around 2010, I tore down and rebuilt everything that family, school, and society had taught me.
I read history, I read politics, I read finance. Not to get credentials, but to re-understand how this world actually works.
Then I started writing, started making things, started externalizing what was in my head so it could be tested.
Year after year, I slowly developed a self that did not depend on anyone else’s definition.
Not fast, but solid.
This is the process of re-raising yourself.
The previous twenty or thirty years were other people raising you, with far too many hidden agendas mixed in.
Now your body has grown up, and you have enough ability and resources, so you can raise yourself.
Do not believe those mystical awakening myths anymore.
Look inward, and there is only emptiness.
Act outward, and there is substance.
Do not look for yourself; build a self.
Use input to reinstall the system, and use output to calibrate the system.
This engineering process is how you become a newtype.