the subtle erosion of identity

how we give our agency away, and how to take it back

The lighters are gone.

If you’ve been around long enough, you know that painfully sweet feeling of holding a Bic lighter over your head in a crowded stadium until the flicker gets a little too hot on your thumb, but you still resist the urge to let go of the orange lever keeping the flame lit.

iPhone flashlights have become the replacement now, lighting up auditoriums across the world. Certainly less blister-producing, though I remember those fan scars all too well.

Caught in the moment Saturday night in Detroit. iPhone in hand.

But our phones are doing a lot more than that.

They’re also telling us where to go, what to buy, what to wear, what to eat, what to read, where to stay and, increasingly, who we might want to become.

Trust me, I know. I spent much of this summer with one of those phones in my hand.

I also spent it doing things I genuinely love.

I knocked bucket list items down one after another. I went gorilla trekking in Rwanda. I spent four days detoxing at a longevity institute in Mexico. I strolled along the promenades in beach towns along the Pacific Coast and spent quiet mornings sipping smoothies from SunLife Café while taking in the boho chic lifestyle in Malibu.

My camera reel is evidence of a summer well-traveled and well lived.

And I assure you, it was.

Yet somehow, I came home feeling less like myself.

It took me a while to understand the contradiction.

I wasn’t unhappy and certainly not ungrateful. Quite the opposite. I had spent months with people I love, in places I love, doing things I had chosen to do, some of which I never dreamed of doing.

But I had also spent an extraordinary amount of time in motion. I crisscrossed the globe and was on more airplanes and in more airports than I can count. I was planning the next destination while still standing in the current one and filling those endless hours of waiting and traveling by clicking and scrolling and consuming. I wish I could say otherwise, but that’s the reality.

Somewhere in there, my summer started to feel a little like Disneyland.

Where everything was perfectly queued. Every menu item reviewed before I had even arrived and taken a bite. Everything optimized for all the obvious reasons. Let’s be real. If you get to do it once, you want to do it right.

I was never lost. And apart from one delayed bag, I was never at a loss.

But that was almost the problem.

We went to San Diego for a wedding toward the end of the summer and I could not figure out what to wear. I know, it sounds so petty. I don’t keep a closet full of formal attire, so buying, renting, or borrowing was required. But I simply couldn’t decide. And before you decide to stop reading, give me a moment. I think you’ll relate.

I think I looked at every dress on the internet. I saw what other people were wearing to formal weddings, what was trending, what looked good on someone with my body type, what other women had bought and returned, what some faceless Instagram page had bundled together and deemed appropriate for an August wedding in Southern California.

I scrolled myself into static. Complete shopping paralysis.

Eventually, the day before we left, I ordered a green dress and had it drop-shipped to our Airbnb. By the grace of God, it fit and the steam iron got the wrinkles out.

And the irony was, I loved it.

I left home with the shoes, jewelry and a hope and a prayer the dress would arrive and work.

I would choose it again.

That last part matters.

Because I’ve been thinking a lot about influence lately, and I don’t think influence is the problem.

We are supposed to be influenced.

People introduce us to books that change us. Friends take us somewhere we never would have found ourselves. Someone recommends a restaurant and we have one of the best meals of our lives. We travel somewhere because another person went first and knows we will equally love it.

Our lives have always been shaped by what other people show us. It’s part of the human experience.

What’s changed is the volume.

We’ve always been influenced by other people, but we’ve never had this many people influencing us at once. There are more places to go, things to buy, ways to live and versions of ourselves to consider than we could possibly get to in one lifetime. And somehow we’ve managed to put access to all of it into a five-inch screen we carry in our back pocket.

This is not a revolutionary idea. But it’s the first time I’ve felt truly at odds with it.

Perhaps it’s because I’m in the midst of my own era of reinvention, one I just wrote about in Empty Nest: Your Most Informed Reinvention Yet. I’m actively thinking about what I want next, and suddenly I feel like I’m drowning in options.

A nice problem to have, admittedly. But an overwhelming one.

Let’s be real. Before our feet hit the floor in the morning, we can consume dozens of other people’s choices.

And eventually, something subtle can begin to happen.

Exposure starts masquerading as desire.

I am the first to acknowledge that I am susceptible to the digital age’s latest marketing tactics. It’s like I have no armor against it.

You see the cozy blanket enough times where wanting it starts to feel like your idea and needing it feels like a requirement for comfort.

Or in my case, you see the destination enough times and it becomes your bucket list. Hence gorillas in Rwanda.

Or alternatively, you watch someone else’s morning routine and begin questioning your own.

Or ultimately, you see another person’s career, body, house, marriage, business, wellness practice, success, reinvention or life and some little part of you begins asking:

Should I be doing that too?

I know I am not alone here. Instagram shopping has become the modern-day version of QVC, with packages begin arriving long after you forgot about that late night order.

And you don’t need to be sitting at a midlife crossroads to feel the weight of this. I see it happening with my own 21-year-old daughter as she explores what comes next after college.

This isn’t a life-stage problem that arrives with an AARP card. It’s a life problem that comes with an iPhone and 24/7 access to everyone else’s choices.

Most of the time, we don’t even notice when this is happening, and perhaps that’s what frightens me.

I am a fully educated adult woman with an MBA and a CV that points toward success. I often joke that I missed my calling as a CIA agent. I am clearly someone who likes to be informed.

Yet I realize I am slowly bleeding away my own agency.

There is no dramatic moment when we decide to give it up. It happens quietly. One search, one recommendation, one review, one double tap, one metric and one fulfilled shopping cart later.

We become extraordinarily good at making informed decisions while becoming less practiced at making intuitive ones.

Even the simple guardrail of requiring cash or a credit card in hand is gone. The ease with which we make decisions has become a little like driving on autopilot, without much thought about how we arrived at the destination.

I started forming ideas the way AI forms sentences, predicting the next likely thing based on everything I had already consumed.

The algorithm isn’t just guessing what I like anymore. It’s actually showing me who I could become. And if I do a little extra work, I can meet my future-self avatar who’s already doing the thing I haven’t even fully baked in my own mind.

It’s both wild and completely creepy to think about.

And after enough exposure to all those possible selves, I realize I’m having a harder time hearing who I was underneath all the layers I’ve built on top of her.

That’s the erosion I’m talking about.

Not losing yourself in some dramatic existential collapse or a midlife crisis. It’s something much quieter.

It happens in a way you don’t even realize and it look likes this: You become a little less certain about which product to buy. So you explore more options, compare items or places, and review everyone else’s Reddit comments. Because God forbid we don’t exhaust every possibility.

You might consider this being informed. I certainly did and still do. But eventually, the line between inspiration and influence becomes difficult to see.

This is especially ironic for me. I created an entire publication around preference.

The Preferred Edit is a place for everything I love, everything I prefer, the things that work for me, the places that inspire me and the beautiful details that bring me joy.

Preferred is the whole point.

Which might be why I’m paying so much attention to this now. Knowing what I prefer matters to me.

I think I’ve spent the last few years believing that choosing myself was the work. I’ve written about it. I’ve practiced it. In many ways, I’ve rebuilt my life around it. Particularly after my late husband died and reinvention was my only choice.

But I’m beginning to understand there is another piece.

You can choose yourself and still not be choosing for yourself.

Those are different. And it’s taken me time to grasp that notion.

Choosing yourself is agency. Choosing for yourself is discernment.

And maybe discernment is simply knowing yourself well enough to take in everything the world has to offer without assuming you need to absorb all of it.

Now, do I still stand behind everything I have shared? Yes, 100%. But trust me when I say, discernment is becoming the new muscle to flex, one that doesn’t require creatine and extra protein, because that certainly falls in the realm of influence these days.

Maybe the question isn’t whether something influenced me. Of course it did.

Maybe the question is much simpler:

Would I choose the green dress again? Yes.

And the irony is, it was one of the very first ones I saved in my quest for the dress.

My intuition was right. I just became distracted by everything else.

I hate to admit it, but this happens more often than not. And sometimes the consequences are far greater than arriving in town without a dress in hand.

The same thing happened again recently when I was planning yet another trip, another bucket-list one.

At every turn, I seemed to come across another roadblock. Somewhere along the way, I said to my husband, “I feel like I’m trying to put a square peg into a round hole. The universe is trying to tell me this is not the right time.”

But I persevered. I made the plans and put the deposit down, only to realize just this week that there is, in fact, a roadblock. And this one I can’t work around.

My intuition was right. Again.

But I was so clouded by the possibility of an extraordinary trip. I fell in love with each glossy image, every review, and the one that seems to get me every time: the scarcity mentality that if I don’t do it now, there will be no more rooms, no more flights and no way to get there.

I don’t think I’ve lost touch with my intuition at all. If anything, these two experiences tell me the opposite.

I think the outside world has gotten really good at what it does.

Influencers know how to influence. Marketing companies know how to market. AI knows how to press our hot buttons. Someone is always listening in, whether we want them to or not.

And that’s the slow drip.

This isn’t me battling against modern-day technology. It’s the realization of what I’ve given up along the way.

I know there are people who can stand firmly grounded in their own decisions and their own intuition. But I also think there’s a leak happening for all of us, whether we realize it or not.

I’m not here to stand on a soapbox. I’m just here to say, wow. I see it. It’s happening. It’s real.

And I’m going to reclaim what I can, where I can and how I can.

Because agency and choice arrived as scarcity for me growing up. Maybe that’s why realizing how casually I’ve given pieces of both away now hits differently.

At first I thought this was about control, because that is how I’m hardwired. I’m a Capricorn, after all. We like to be the ones standing at the helm with a clipboard in hand.

But this isn’t about control. It’s about returning to self.

And not the controlling self that needs to dictate every turn. I’m talking about the self that sits at the seat of my soul. The place where my intuition is grounded.

That part of me. The one that asks, what still feels like me? What am I pursuing because I genuinely want it versus what am I pursuing because I’ve seen it enough times to believe I should?

I consider what gives me energy. What makes me curious. What makes me feel most comfortable in my own skin.

Those questions feel different from the ones I’ve been asking, and they take me back to one of my earliest articles, The Cost of a Borrowed Identity, where I explore what it looks like to make authentic choices.

Since coming home, I’ve been craving stillness in a way I haven’t in a long time.

I notice I’m clicking less and integrating more. I’m noticing more and consuming less. I think my UPS man would agree. He’s probably wondering what happened to me.

I also find myself wondering less about what I should do next and paying more attention to what I actually want next.

I’m tired of giving my agency away, piece by piece and click by click.

And what bothers the controlling part of me the most is realizing how often I’ve done this without knowing I was doing it.

This isn’t about wanting a life without influence or a world without technology.

I want to hear it all, and I certainly want the ease every device offers. I just want my own intuition to have the final vote.

The dress stays.

It turns out it’s a good one.

Always EDITing,
Leslie

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Please tell me I am not the only one who feels this slow drip of self. I would love to know your thoughts.

A few of my latest articles — this is me learning embracing self promotion.

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