Who Are We, Really? — The Atlantic

I needed to find some way to figure out who I was, what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life.”

We see ourselves as others see us, and when we feel invisible, well, we have a tendency to fall to pieces.

In our post-privacy world of pervasive social-media sharing, GPS tracking, cellphone-tower triangulation, wireless sensor monitoring, browser-cookie targeting, face-recognition detecting, consumer-intention profiling, and endless other means by which our

What are you, really?

For those who ask, with Gauguin, “Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going?”—and who feel that the answering of those questions is the grand mission of the species—the prospect of a collective life in an electronic hive is bound to seem terrifying.

Under modernity, each person must be a piece in a jigsaw puzzle: completely unique but predictably so—a piece that is different from all those around it but still able to fit into a larger picture. We have more artifacts, both material and digital, than ever with which to enact our identities, yet we can never seem capable of staying unique for lon