Do you ever find yourself stuck with a catchy tune or song in your head? Maybe you remember how the chorus went, but the rest of the details are pretty fuzzy. Desperation leads you to look over your shoulders — you know, to make sure nobody is in earshot of your awkward hums as you mouth breathe into your smartphone mic, with hopes that some neural network can recognize your vocal query, and match it with a song in its database.
We now have incredible services like SoundHound, Shazam, and other web applications to help us find that song stuck in our heads. The advent of Google and the cached public Internet has drastically reduced the friction from feeling stuck with a burning thought/question, to being able to get some kind of decent answer, most of the time.
With any search query, the more data points you have, the better the likelihood that you will find what you are looking for.
If I was to look for a classical fiction book that I remember fondly enjoying in the fourth grade, I would try narrowing my search results with search parameters. I could run my query with filters for potential publication years, tentative book titles, and enter in any vague details that I can remember from the story. I would search the public education curriculum from the time I was in school, or I might even reach out to my former teacher or elementary school. Basically, I’d throw whatever information I could manifest into the Google search bar, praying that the gods of large language models return a valid hit.
Google Thyself
Have you ever Googled yourself?
Like, not just your government name, but also any name that you might have used online in the past?
It might be your old Xbox gamertag, the username you used on your favorite Internet forum boards, or even an old email cached in a data dump that was used to access some free, but crucial online service that you needed years ago.
If you haven’t Googled yourself before, it could be worth taking a trip down memory lane — note that this may lead to some panic, as you realize the sheer quantity of the archive of your life cached on Google’s servers.
Identity Crisis
Sometimes I have clients in my practice who find themselves struggling with their identity. It might be because of some major life transition, recent traumatic event, or struggling inner conflict but hasn’t yet been explored — out of fear, procrastination, or feeling unsafe and frozen.
As an exercise in exploring one’s self-perception of their identity, I sometimes ask clients if they can describe themselves using keywords. You know, like if hypothetically the client was to search for themselves online in hopes of getting some answers, without using any of their real names, identities or aliases, what would they type in the Google search bar?
Depending on the person, their current struggles, and their life stage, the answers do surprisingly vary (modified examples):
student, male, gamer
partner, helper, Russian
anxious, perfectionist, tired
father, husband, welder, son
freelance marketer, runner, creative
mother, addict, Protestant, adventurer
This is a really insightful activity, for many reasons.
Not only does the order of the words matter, but notice the content is interesting as well. With each of these keywords, you can form somewhat of a loose intersectionality of clustered “identity” nodes, that gravitate around the person’s present sense of self.
You obviously won’t get the full picture (humans are a bit more complicated than that). These keywords are certainly not an exhaustive list, but they are quite telling about how the person sees themselves. Some of the descriptors are tied to a life stage (student, husband), while others are tied to labelling, and describing a chronic problem (anxious, addict). Other identity nodes are tied to career, religion, and nationality!
Just like how we can have that one catchy song or captivating book stuck in our heads, so too can we at times feel stuck with ourselves, with partially formed nodes of identity. We can feel a loss of our sense of self and identity, and find ourselves stuck with a short list of approximate axioms and identifiers. We’re left feeling incomplete, and not our true selves. Just as one can use Google search to find a particular song or book, some free association with a framing of our identities as a Google search query might help in understanding our own sense of self (who we are), and perhaps learn a bit more about who we want to be.
Real vs. Ideal
These are Rogerian terms (taken from here).
The real self is the person as they are. The real self is the actual self that reflects the true qualities, aptitudes, inclinations, and characteristics of an individual. It is intrinsically who a person actually is. It is the way one thinks, feels, looks, and behaves.
The ideal self is the self defined by the characteristics to which the individual aspires. It is a self guide. It is the self that one believes they want to be, strives to be, and believes they should be as a result of what they have learned and experienced. This self is a result of outside influences. The ideal self is the repository of values absorbed from others; it is the sum of all the things a person believes they should be and that they believe others think they should be.
Advanced Search
Those of you who have had to rely on Google for a large part of their work/life (most of us), may likely be familiar with some of the advanced search taxonomy used by Google search.
In this context of searching for ourselves, we can work towards modifying our keyword query search in a way where we can start to explore what it means to align the real self, with the ideal self.
In one of the sample keyword search queries above, “mother, addict, Protestant, adventurer”, you might sense that this individual carries a lot of responsibility as a caretaker, is working through some sort of addiction, may have an inner self conflict/narrative around the addiction and their religious belief system, and their personality may be one where they are higher than average on the trait “openness to new experience”. I recognize that this is a bit of a Rorschach test of projection, but as a starting point, it is better than having no background knowledge or understanding of the person and their identity struggles.
Further building on this Rorschach interpretation, if we were to get technically suggestive for a second, one of the goals this person might have is to work through their addiction, in counselling/psychotherapy. Meaning, while we don’t have a complete and exhaustive list of the person’s identity as described in four keywords (likely neither the client, nor the therapist fully understands the client), we do know that we can modify the existing query to match this one aspect of the person’s ideal self, as they may see it.
From: “mother, addict, Protestant, adventurer” (present real self)
To: “mother, Protestant, adventurer, -addict” (an ideal self)
Here, we are acknowledging that some addiction has become a key part of this person’s identity, to the point where it was the second keyword that they used to describe themselves, ahead of their faith, and a personality trait. In the modified keyword search, we essentially moved the “addict” self-definition to be an exclusionary term in the search result (by adding “-” before the word). Meaning, the person ideally wants to hold onto their identity as a mother, Protestant, and adventurer, but they want to exclude the term “addict” from their self-search query, by working through their addiction, within the capacity and context of their lives.
Now, I don’t actually sit down with my clients and go over how to use advanced search techniques in Google as a way of “finding themselves” (can you imagine?). However, such an exercise in asking one how they define themselves in something as short as a Google-able search query, can be extremely powerful in exploring one’s sense of self-understanding. Through this exercise, the parts of ourselves that are relevant, unique, and heavily weigh on our sense of self and being, naturally emerge. Ultimately, this can be a step towards better understanding our real self, which might in-turn help to identify the parts of us that we might want to evaluate, change, lose, or grow from, into our ever-evolving ideal self.
Although… it would be pretty cool if I could just enter a few keywords into a highly intelligent supercomputer, Google my identity, skip the self reflection part, throw in some positive psychology terms that sound nice, optimize for life satisfaction (not happiness!), and find the answers somewhere on a personalized Wikipedia page for what my life would look like, between the year 2030 and 2040, perfectly outlining my life in accordance with my ideal self…
identity, self reflection OR growth OR change OR self-actualization OR life satisfaction AND "who am I, really?" AND “what do I want in this life?” --happiness site:wikipedia.org 2030..2040
If you were to “Google yourself”, what would be some of your keywords?
very interesting !!!!
thank you Mohit
very interesting!!
Thank you Mohit