Respectfully, I disagree. Every label or identity is yet another pigeonhole to be stuffed into and a thought-terminating cliche that reduces the complexity of one's life into an overly simplistic symbol which fails to represent the totality of one's being. Better to dispense with such coarse-grained oversimplifications and reject the notion of labelling selves entirely.

> You're not only your job, but you're also a parent, a child, an athlete, a hobbyist, etc.

You're actually none of those things. In the words of Alan Watts, [0]

The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with
reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth, and our names
about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, with ourselves.

You are neither a job, nor a parent, nor a child nor athlete nor any of these things. That which can be named and labelled is not reality; it enters into the sphere of representation and takes us a layer of abstraction away from the base reality of what you are, of which we cannot really speak and must treat in silence (see the Tao, or the Tetragrammaton).

We exchange these names of ourselves, ideas of ourselves, language describing ourselves, with others, hoping that the full reality of ourselves will be communicated, in whole and not in part, to others, who will actually see past the symbols and recognize the selves to which they point. In actuality they conflate the symbol and the self, the representation for the reality, falling victim to the deception of Baudrillard's simulacrum, of images that "mask and denature a profound reality."

Hence the injunction of the philosopher Kwaw to the daimios of Japan in Aleister Crowley's parable Konx Om Pax [1] to call themselves "the Synagogue of Satan, so as to keep themselves from the friendship of the fools who mistake names for things," while advocating not a "Satanist" way of life, but rather a Taoist one seeking the equilibration of opposites to achieve first inner personal harmony and then outer societal harmony.

A postmodernist would see the label "Satanist" and immediately conjure up images and notions of evil and "the adversary," confusing the name with the actual thing, the deeds and the philosophy of the synagogue, never bothering to inquire beyond the label and the name into the nature of the thing itself, letting their priors and biases make uninformed snap judgments for them. A modern instantiation of Kwaw's tactic can be found in The Satanic Temple, who advocates not for "evil" (whatever this word means) but for the advancement of rationality and reproductive rights. Yet this phenomenon extends far beyond The Satanic Temple and religion and extends to all of life more broadly, and this simplistic reduction of the world into one-word labels and mental filing cabinets is what lends to the exact same tribalism pg notes in his essay.

Ascribing labels to one's self limits your degrees of freedom by circumscribing your capabilities and characteristics within the bounds of the label. For if I am P, then I am not (not P) and immediately I have entered into a dualistic discourse of "me" and "not me" or of "self" and "other." Now you are beholden to a past, a history, and limited by that which you have identified with, rejecting what you are not yet but could at one point be. The very clinging to what scraps of "identity" one has accumulated around one's self is precisely what leads to this fragility of personality once those identities are forcibly taken away.

Ironically postmodern ideologies admit of "non-binary" sexualities that reject simplistic dichotomies and labels, but fail to extend this mode of thinking to other domains of life that would benefit from the same treatment; instead they insist on fractionating all of society into discretized identity groups and factions instead of recognizing the unique individuality of each human being, failing to acknowledge that continua instead of hard dichotomies exist and reality is not so cleanly divided. These ideologies purport to have moved beyond stereotypes and assuming everyone had the same lived experiences growing up, and yet continues to do exactly that with simplistic filing away of people into labelled cabinets of "identity."

All abstractions are leaky, including abstractions of self. Postmodern (Facebook onwards) social media has enabled a new era of idolatry; where once we erected statues and idols in a vain attempt to capture the ineffability of gods, now we publish online profiles and reels in a vain, narcissistic attempt to capture the ineffability of the self.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYp-mWqB1w

[1] http://www.astrumargenteum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Ko...