Guest Blog. This essay was written by a recent student-friend, as he explores one of those areas by which we establish meaning in our lives, our self-ascribed identities. For my generation, this might have been best captured by the reflection on "What do you do?" from the 8.31.2018 blog Working It Out, but for a Millenial like Andrew, this is more what it is like for a bright college graduate on a path to finding himself. It's not so much about the "identity politics" of what

We all take as a given, like fish in water, a cultural and historical preoccupation with the “self” as something to nurture, protect, express, develop, and share. Nevertheless, not only is this an historically recent cultural phenomenon, not rooted in our biology, but only emerging in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Moreover, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz once said, that however incorrigible it may seem to us, it is a “rather peculiar” idea in the context of w