Who Am I
What can I say about myself?.
I can do that by talk about my childhood in Hong Kong, my love of Table Tennis and my becoming of a coach.
Or how weird a kid I was at school, and the rollercoaster of my academia journey.
I may also talk about my career as an Engineer, my love of programming and architecture, and how I spend quite some amount of time into the projects that I have created over the years.
I can also go over Timely Wealth, business, and investing too.
But they are topics that can span over multiple articles, and essentially what this site is about.
So should I summarize them, may be, but that’s BORING. What’s interesting are the details, not some run-of-the-mill summary.
So instead, let me try to answer the age-old question: Who Am I.
Who Am I?
(disclaimer: here I’m only refer to how I look at the question, not the life work and philosophy of others)
When I think about this question, a few things come to mind.
It is an overloaded question
The question of “who am I” is very abstract and the answers to the question can be vastly different. It can be answered in a very reduced and concrete form similar to the question of “what would be on your tombstone?”, or it can elaborate into details about my physical appearance, mental state, or my spiritual believes. Or it can go down the path of self-awareness and the philosophical questioning of the meaning of existence.
So it basically depends on the context.
And in the context of being in the “about me” section of my blogs, My answer should address:
- How do I think? What’s my philosophy, ideas, and values?
Are they align with yours or at least you will find them interesting? - What’s my personality? Do you resonate with me, are you insufferable with my communication style?
Will my funky sense of humor offends you, or will it occasionally crack you up? - Do I have the accolades or experience in the specific topics that I share,
so that you can put some trust into the mumbo jumbo that I’m sharing?
It is a wrong question to ask
While there is nothing wrong for me to share with you about whom I think I am, It is a very natural thing for you to question if I am genuine. Could I be exaggerating things? Could I be just making up things that’s not true?
Maybe some testimonials or references could be a better solution. However, this is my blog, so you have every right to question their legitimacy.
That’s why I think this is the wrong question to ask.
The bottom line is that these “about me” or “who am I” are meant to build trust in the reader.
But trust is not built by saying who am I, it is earned by want I share, and doing what I share.
By the way, you may find online nowadays that says trust is given, not earned, or trust is granted, not earned. While there are some truth to that, they fundamentally based on the fact that the person whom to be trusted still needs to earn it, or at least not doing things to destroy it.
Middle age crisis?
When I decided to bring up the “who am I” question while writing this “about me” section, the words “middle age crisis” pop up into my mind. Often time this kind of “soul-searching” questions are associated with “middle age crisis” and often gets a bad rep.
Outside academic circles, of course.
But it doesn’t have to, it is never too early to start thinking about these questions.
To me, the “who am I” question helps me to align my path.
When I was a kid, my friend invite me to his house to play video games on his 80286, and when he upgrades to 80386, he gave his 80286 to me. While using it to play games, I also learn to write programs with BASIC.
I was hooked.
That’s probably when I know I want to be a programmer.
Fast-forward to today, that thought and experience shaped who I am, and as I didn’t deviate from that direction too much, I have a career that I enjoy.
So to me, the question of “who am I” is similar to “knowing thyself”. It’s about giving a chance for you to know about yourself, and create alignment between who you are, who you want to be, and who you are in the eye of others.
I think, therefore I am
In Chinese, there is this phrase “我思故我在”, which is the translation of “I think, therefore I am”. It is the “first principle” of René Descartes’s philosophy.
While I didn’t study philosophy, I’m always interested in it, and in traditional Chinese teaching, there are abundant wisdom to draw from.
But I digress. I won’t go into the details of it. Instead, I want to talk about its implication, specifically, on the phrase “I think”.
”I think” carries several implications.
Firstly, it’s my ability to think. My ability to receive information, my ability to analyze and generate ideas, my ability to reason. These all comes from my ability to think.
So what if I lost that ability? Or as I grow older, ability to think starts deteriorating? Am I still me?
Of course, I am. It’s just a different me. So the “me-ness” is a dynamic concept. It’s ever-changing, it can be changed over time, over events, even over a single thought.
So what I get out of that is, the question is somewhat meaningless to me, and I should treasure every moment and live it to the fullest.
Secondly, if I stop thinking, I cease to exist. That’s conclusion of the original “I think, therefore I am”.
One wisdom I draw from that, is I am not going to be an echo function. i.e. not merely repeating what other people said.
What I said must originate from me. I must process them, add my own findings and understandings, and find a way to present it in my own words.
In another word, originality. Or more fundamentally, critical thinking.
Thirdly, what I think matters.
If thinking is a proof that I exist, what I think defines who I am.
What kind of person I want to be?
I am fully responsible on controlling what I think, and how I think.
What information I received, or allow myself to receive, and how I process them, in what way I approach them, etc., are all matters and define and shape who I am.
Are we hanging around with friends that only look that things in one particular way? Are we reading and getting information on only one side of the story? Are we aware of that? If we do, can we put sufficient amount of doubt into the information and the conclusions we drew from them? Is my thinking, or my way of thinking align with that?
Another aspect is, with the limited time we have, how much thinking we can do is also limited.
Mind wonders, we all do, but the key is are we self-aware and able to steer it. Can I focus on what matter to me, and resist thinking about what doesn’t matter to me?
Fourthly, “I think, therefore I am” may not really matter that much, at the end.
You might have heard of the famous story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French journalist who wrote the book “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”.
He had locked-in syndrome caused by the massive stroke he had, and wrote the book by blinking his left eyelid.
It was an amazing story.
A person in locked-in state clearly still have a sense of I, and still “exists” under the description of “I think, therefore I am”.
But how much difference does it make materially?
Maybe in the near future, people in locked-in state can get an implant of Neuralink, and they can interact with the outside world again. But for those who doesn’t, able to maintain self-awareness may not mean much.
Of course, I need to put a strong disclaimer here, that ALL life matters. It is not an excuse or a view to justify decrease any help to people in such unfortunate state.
My point is, what matters at the end may come down to materialization or manifestation of who I am. Yes, it goes full cycle back to the tombstone question.
In the 90s, there was an anime series called “Future GPX Cyber Formula”. The main character Hayato Kazami once said he wants to leave a proof that he once live in the racing circuit. A typical translation of that would be something like “leave a mark in the circuit”, but the phrase “a proof that he once live” in Japanese is “生きる証”, which hit me hard when I was a kid (a side note: I loved the series so much that for some time, I listen to some of its songs before I head to school exams).
I can think and think, self-fulfilling all day. But without actually producing something, at the end it just doesn’t matter.
Conclusion
So that’s my take on the “who am I” question. Hopefully, it can help you to understand who I am, how I think, and how I share my thoughts, thus serving the purpose of describing something about me.
Cheers, 🍻 (no, I don’t drink beers)