How Do You Describe Yourself?

15 Nov 2021

The words we use to describe ourselves change our everyday actions and, by extension, our identities. A few American psychology experiments have touched on aspects of this - in “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, Daniel Kahneman lists a slew of experiments that all sound something like this -

• A test subject, let’s call him Gary, is shown a list of words.
• All of the words are loosely associated with old age. Words like “Florida”, “Golf”, “Pension”. Really harmless words. Gary reads them, takes a “quiz”, gets $20 for participating, yada yada yada.
• Gary is told the experiment is finished; he’ll be checked out at the exit. The real point of the experiment starts here: Gary is timed while walking from quiz to receptionist.

In this experiment, Gary (and a lot of participants both similar and dissimilar to Gary) were shown words reminiscent of old age, while other participants of a similar demographic were shown words about being young and spry. The researchers found that Gary and his cohort walked significantly slower to the reception after being shown “old age” words (slower than even the control group, and significantly slower than the other cohort being shown “young” words).

Just being shown words can slow you down. Our subconscious is that gullible. Even subtle acts, like smiling versus frowning, affect your demeanor and outlook on the day.

Imagine then, the effects of how you talk to yourself. A lot less subtle and a lot more frequent. If we extrapolate from the other experiments out there, we can very safely guess that it makes at least a small difference on your day to day. Or, just look in the mirror and tell yourself you’re a piece of shit 10 times in a row and see how you feel. Anything that affects your daily outlook, even in a subtle way, culminates into an enormous impact on your life as the days add up and the habits form.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own self talk. Specifically, two qualities that are integral parts of my identity: luck (or luckiness) and resiliency.

As a kid, I was really good at games. Not necessarily skill based games, but any game that hinged heavily on luck. I have a clear memory of laughing manically as I skunked my mom in cribbage as an eight-year-old, getting impossibly good hands to comeback from a deficit and win. Another memory stands out - getting a royal flush not once, but twice in a night, while playing poker against my brother and his friend. At one point, after passing Go 4 times in a row without landing on a single one of my brothers hotels, he got up and left, proclaiming he would never play Monopoly with me again.

Looking back on it with a more mature and scientific perspective, other factors besides luck were in play. One component was definitely confirmation bias about my luck. Another component might have come from my early intuitions on probability that caught my parents off guard. Now, as an adult, years of being called lucky by those around me means that I generally regard myself as lucky.

Why is being lucky good, and how does this help my sense of identity?

When good things happen to me, it reaffirms my belief that the universe favors me. I have a general feeling that the luck will keep coming - if you flip heads 24 times in a row, the 25th is still a 50:50 chance. Maybe I’ll have a stretch of bad luck, but even in the worst of times I hold fast to my belief that another bout of good luck is just right around the corner. Furthermore, when bad things happen, I don’t take them too seriously. I interpret it as a balancing of the cosmic scales; such good luck is bound to have bad turns.

How about resiliency?

I don’t have as firm of a relationship with resiliency. I only just started coming to terms with it. For a while, I referred to my happiness as “buoyant”, and I thought that was pretty fitting - when things get me down, they don’t get me down for very long.

Lately, that hasn’t been as true. Moving to a new city, repeated bouts of sickness, and a bunch of other large life events/changes have kept me on my toes. Lately I haven’t felt as buoyant, frankly I’ve felt underwater at times. But buoyant and resilient are kind of different. Resilient tastes different; I find myself enjoying the downs more. It’s a test, a challenge. I know I’ll come out on the other side, because I always do - I’m resilient.

Recently I got food poisoning a week before a half marathon I had planned. It took me out for about 24 hours, but soon after I was back exercising, ready to go. I ran into a friend of mine at the pool; she looked shocked to see me. “You caught me by surprise in the pool- figured you might still be out for the count” she texted me afterwards. Without thinking about it much I replied “I’m the most resilient guy I know”. I meant it. That sentence, and realizing my steadfast belief in my own resiliency, changed my day. I looked back at the last four weeks of turmoil and thought to myself, “no big deal. I’m resilient. On the up and up”.

Conscious and subconscious beliefs are both important, but conscious beliefs are definitely more powerful. The words we associate with those beliefs have energy; they are totems to our own power. We can call upon them dire circumstances, to remind ourselves who we really are. The weeks I forget my resiliency and good luck are the hardest weeks, the weeks I’m lost.

Many of ideas originally took hold in my brain in college. I had just inhaled a series of books by Michael Lewis and Walter Isaacson over break when my dad handed me an article in the Post by Walter Isaacson on Michael Lewis. I kept it taped to the wall of my room for the next four years.

“I get such pleasure out of knowing that I’m lucky. It allows me to assume that I will continue to be lucky. I am creating a narrative of my life, and it makes me braver and less fearful.” - Michael Lewis.