Who You Are Vs. What You Control

If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. (More) 

A person, family, firm, or nation sees some of the things in its sphere of control as its precious non-negotiable self, while other things are merely things it controls, things it is willing to change or sacrifice in the service of its self. This distinction is often a continuum, but even so it is a real and important one. 

Agents that try to grow or persist into the future face a key tradeoff. The more stuff they include in their identity, the harder it is to compete to make that identity persist into the future. And the longer a duration persistence one desires, the harder it is to achieve.

When rich folks care only about persisting only a few decades, they can afford to cram much into their identities. And typical folks in our rich society today have been doing a lot of this. Their identities are crammed full of songs, movies, political positions, and even mental illness diagnoses. And as marrying someone with a different identity might force compromises to their identity, we have a new norm of not marrying until one’s identity is fully formed and crammed full, and then only marrying a close match.

It is a mistake for a startup firm to pursue many different unrelated innovative deviations from standard practices. (That was a mistake I saw Xanadu make long ago.) Usually it is best to choose just a single key gamble, and then be conservative and on all their other practice and strategy choices. Though a key gamble might be a key package that needs several supporting deviant components. And if that key gamble fails, they need to stand ready to disband or pivot to another single key gamble. 

If you want stuff like you to persist long into a competitive future, you probably need to limit your identity to something pretty small. I’m not sure how small, but a lot smaller than typical identities today. I recently tried to outline just how small for “rational” cultural survivalists. 

Some hope that a world government will end prevent strong competition in the future, and thus allow the persistence of wider identities. But I find it hard to imagine there wouldn’t then be big fights for control over that government. So competition would persist, just in a different form.