You may to know yourself as well as you think you do

And that may be ok

Excerpt: "Know thyself: Many have said this. Socrates—maybe you’ve heard of him? Though he seems to have gotten the phrase from the oracle at Apollo’s temple in Delphi, where it was chiseled into the stone facade.

In the Tao-te Ching, Lao-tzu wrote, “If you understand others you are smart. If you understand yourself you are illuminated.”

And Shakespeare had his own pithy aphorism, “To thine own self be true,” presupposing that thou knowest enough about thine own self to be true to it.

Good advice, to a point. If you know absolutely nothing about yourself or your likes, wants, values, or personality, you either are a baby or have bigger problems than a dead philosopher can address.

Yet sometimes all of modern life seems to be pushing people toward knowing themselves in more and more granular ways. People are going to therapy in rising numbers to seek self-understanding. They are tracking their steps, reading, and sleep.

They are giving their data to corporate marketing databases so they can find out their Myers-Briggs type, Enneagram number, or Harry Potter house.

On TikTok, as Rebecca Jennings reported for Vox, creators are inventing new micro-identities for people to resonate with: “Dilly dally-ers”are people who like to fart around and waste time; a “therapist friend” is someone whose friends talk to them about their problems. The quest to find and define yourself can feel never-ending.