The Undoing of Identity

The Collapse

In my previous essay, Before the Learning, the Undoing, I described the cardiac event that disrupted my life, and the conclusions that followed. This event jolted me out of whatever illusion I had been living in — irreversibly changing everything. In this essay, I delve further into what unfolded from that December evening, and the quieter unraveling that followed.

In the aftermath of my recovery, as I slowly began turning my attention back to the company I had cofounded, I was devastated to learn that things were falling apart. Whether as a direct consequence of my absence for a few months or purely by happenstance hardly matters now. The grim reality was that a company built over thirteen years of blood, sweat, and tears — thirteen years of immense personal sacrifice — was at the end of its life. The inevitable decision was to shut it down. What had grown from two founders to over fifty highly skilled technology consultants was ending not with acquisition or celebration, but with quiet dissolution.

Faced with the end of my career, my business, the uncertainty of my health, and much of the day-to-day structure of my life, I found myself in an unfamiliar landscape. The map I had long used to navigate life — not just professional identity, but financial security, daily purpose, the familiar rhythm of building and solving — had become meaningless.

The Question

What remained was a question I had never seriously asked myself:

Who am I, when all of this falls away?

The question is almost naive in its simplicity. Surely I knew who I was — after all, I had lived with myself for sixty-plus years. I was the immigrant from a third-world country who had worked hard and made something of himself. I was the technologist who believed he could play any game with someone else’s rules — and win. I was the one who had allowed the ideals of entrepreneurship, the “inspirations” of technology culture, the promise of success shape my identity over decades.

But when I made that brief acquaintance with the Grim Reaper in that ER hallway, none of that mattered. Not the immigrant success story. Not the technological capability. Not the company built from nothing. On that evening in the ER, what had emerged was peace — at a time when the last thing one expects is peace. A peace that had arrived precisely as the structures fell away.

And in the unraveling — as the business dissolved, as the roles evaporated — the question became unavoidable: if none of those identities could survive contact with this new reality, what then was I, really?

The Stripping

I tried to locate myself in my roles… but they had evaporated with the company’s dissolution.
I searched in my achievements… but sitting in the quiet of my home office, the awards on the wall felt like artifacts from someone else’s life, not mine. Distant. Meaningless.
I looked in my knowledge… but what use was a lifetime of acquired technical mastery when I could barely summon the energy to check my email?
I examined my relationships, my function in others’ lives… but that inexplicable peace in the ER was independent of all that too.

One by one, the structures I had mistaken for “me” dissolved. Each subtraction revealed not clarity, but a further layer to be stripped away. And in that stripping, I could hear an echo of an ancient phrase I had once admired from a safe distance: Know Thyself.

I had read those words, seen them quoted in classrooms. These immortal words, carved into Apollo’s temple at Delphi over two millennia ago, had seemed like philosophical decoration — inspiring but distant. But now they landed with the force of a grave medical diagnosis. For decades I thought I knew myself. In truth, I only identified with my roles, my résumé, my reflection in other people’s eyes. The “self” I relied on was scaffolding. Form, not substance.

Further inquiry led me to one inescapable conclusion: clearly, the self is not any of those structures. It cannot be. Something deeper remains — independent of the external form. Something real. Substance.

The Illusion of Growth

This is where the inquiry turns. If identity is an illusion, what is real? If the model of self is incomplete — as every model must necessarily be¹— then where does that leave us?

My first instinct was to construct a new identity — “technologist-anew,” “survivor,” “philosopher,” “the man who almost died.”
Reinvention.
Resurrection.
Rising again, like the mythical Phoenix. 
Or so I thought.
But even these roles were costumes that no longer fit. The same wine in a new bottle. 
A path I had traveled for over a decade, only to wake up and realize that I was trudging up a path that wasn’t mine. 
Sisyphus with a laptop, rolling the Sales Pipeline up the hill. 
A path that had long ceased to hold any joy. There simply was no point in getting back on that hamster wheel.

For as long as I could remember, I had unconsciously, almost unwittingly, subscribed to the “growth is more” belief: a bigger home, nicer cars, larger portfolios, more toys, better vacations. I had subscribed to metrics that made no sense for my actual life — tracking net worth while barely noticing sunsets, optimizing investment returns while my relationships ran on autopilot. I say unconsciously because, in truth, those things had never meant that much to me. As long as I had the basic necessities of life, all the books I could read, music I could listen to, and the chance to create — whether a photograph, an essay, a data model, a business process, or a piece of code — I was essentially content.

The irony is stark: the moments of deepest satisfaction have always come from the simplest of things — a well-written paragraph, a piece of music that stopped time, a conversation that went beneath the surface. 
Yet I had spent decades chasing complexity, allowing myself to drift down the river of social norms, swept along by the current. 
In retrospect, I realize sheepishly how remarkably easy it is to sleepwalk through one’s own life — following scripts written by others, mistaking motion for progress, momentum for growth.

The undoing of identity leads directly into the undoing of another illusion: that growth lies in accumulation. 
The same logic applies — reality strips away what is hollow, leaving us face-to-face with the immensity that remains when the noise is stilled.²

Growth, I began to see, is not about adding more — more titles, more achievements, more self-improvement projects, stacked like bricks on a crumbling wall. 
It is about peeling away what is not essential. About uncovering the David within the block of marble by removing all that is not David. 
About remembering — re-membering³ — the deeper reality that was always there beneath the superficial scaffolding of identity.

Real growth lies in subtraction.

The Opening

And so the inquiry continues. Each subtraction brings me closer to the question that cannot be neatly answered, only experienced. Lived. 
Who am I, really?
Perhaps the answer to this question is purely experiential — far beyond words. Beyond symbolic logic. If the self-model is always incomplete — as Gödel teaches us, all formal systems must necessarily be⁴— then perhaps the real task is not to close the circle, to seek to refine the model, but instead to recognize the opening. To cross this threshold.

This opening leads us into a landscape that is both terrifying and exhilarating.
Terrifying, because it robs us of certainty, of known and comfortable reference points. Terra incognita.
Exhilarating, because it offers us a blank canvas. What we paint there is neither predetermined nor happenstance. It is a choice, the work of a lifetime.

Your Turn
I’d welcome hearing your reflections — those moments when the scaffolding fell away and revealed what lay beneath.
What roles, achievements, or identities have you leaned on most heavily to answer the question “Who am I?”
If those were suddenly stripped away — not by choice, but by circumstance — what would remain?
Where in your life have you mistaken “more” for growth? What might subtraction reveal instead?

Please feel free to share publicly in the comments, or privately at: undoing_raaj (at) proton (dot) me.

Footnotes:

[1] “The map is not the territory,” as Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American scientist, pointed out. I’ll return to this idea in a future essay.

[2] I’ll have much more to say about this in a future essay — how silence, stillness, and the stripping away of noise reveal what is otherwise hidden.

[3] Re-membering: becoming part of, again. To put the pieces back together into a wholeness we never truly lost.

[4] The mathematician Kurt Gödel proved that no formal system can be both complete and consistent at the same time — there are always truths that cannot be proven within the system itself. I’ll have much more on that topic, and how it relates to identity, in a future essay.

With quiet gratitude to Hermann Wittekopf — kmkb on Unsplash for the image, which I tweaked.