Rick Branch - Becoming Nobody: A Personal Account of One Mans Search for Self-Knowledge

I used to fancy myself "a somebody."

Before even reaching my teens, I felt that way. I remember harboring the smugness of believing I was a cut above the ordinary. This conviction of being somebody special stayed with me for much of my life, that is, until I discovered the truth of my ordinariness or what I call my own relative insignificance or nobodiness.

Don't we all have fancies of being somebody special? After all, didn't our parents tell us so? Didn't our politicians instill in us the pride of living in the greatest country on Earth, of belonging to a particularly savvy, hardy, free-thinking group of individuals? Likewise, didn't our religious leaders convince us we were the chosen people of the one true God?

Didn't being raised with these ego-building beliefs and other such confabulations leave us with an exaggerated sense of our own importance?

As Steven Pinker pointed out, "People overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck." Is it any wonder we go out into the world feeling entitled, believing we are destined for and deserving of great things?

It's good to have high hopes and dreams, to 'reach for the stars', to 'be all that you can be'. There's truth to that old saying, "Fortune favors the bold." However, when we have an unrealistic assessment of who we are, we set ourselves up for failure.

That's what happened to me. I overestimated my intelligence, talent, virtue, etc. Sure enough, I went out into the world to find, more often than not, frustration and disappointment. Life turned out to be much more difficult than I expected.

As I grappled with my unhappiness, I began to suspect my own accountability or blame in the matter. Seeing the need to carefully examine what was going on in this head of mine, I took what some call a path, the path to "Know Thyself." I finally came to understand my frustration/disappointment was the result of trying to be something I am not.

I understood that trying to be something you're not means not being who you are. And who are we, really? We are that which remains when all the inaccurate assumptions or pretenses of ourselves have been stripped away.

I understood that "the role of the individual is to see through and undo the web that the culture you were born into has wound around you." (The Madness of Crowds, p. 37)

When we know who we truly are, we have been freed from being a personage made up of ego-building beliefs, freed from what we have been unwittingly attached to and identified with. In other words, we have been freed from being what amounts to a make-believe or fictitious self. If we knew the extent to which this self of ours possesses and deceives us, we might grasp what Einstein said, "The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self."

Of course, the idea of being freed from our self seems ridiculous when we believe our self is all there is to us. "Who would I be," one might ask, "if I were to give up this self of mine? I'd be nobody! What a preposterous notion!"

However, if you have defined yourself with exaggerations or lies of which you are completely unaware, are you not whiling away your time on this planet being fooled?

Maybe it's better to be so fooled. I'm not sure about that. All I know is I can no longer be deceived in this way. Having exposed my thoughts and behavior to the light of reason, I've seen my self-delusions for what they are. I have nothing left to fool myself, nothing left to let me go on fancying myself "a somebody."

This book is about my journey to find the truth of who I am. Though it's a path that turned out to be right for me, I'm not proposing everybody should take a close and honest look at themself. There are logical and compelling arguments that we're better off not having an accurate perception of who we are, that we're better off not knowing the truth about ourselves.

So, if you're happy being the person you are, if you are satisfied or pleased with your self, you may not want to continue reading. To do so is to risk losing that complacence you have.