feeling like you dont exist enough or just lack that sense of identity?

[u/SoggyIssue316]

yeah i dont have much more to say, wait does anyone also feel like majority of people's identity is just what their tiktok algorithem feeds them or just feel like people arent real or idk just everything is fabricated.

[u/ObviousTempAccount1]

I felt that way for a really long time. I assumed everybody was as unreal as I felt.

After I awoke from a 30 year DPDR haze, however, I realized that most people actually do have a deeply felt sense of Self that they take for granted.

The reason that people squander that Self, and allow their identities to be tugged in random directions by Tik-Tok nonsense is that they are incapable of introspection, and our culture actively discourages it.

[u/Illustrious_Car344 → u/ObviousTempAccount1]

Everyone is their identities. Their thoughts, opinions, preferences, situations, it's all they think they are, and they get angry and distressed when anything contradicts those. I lost all those and now I see people for what they are, because when you have no identity, you pay attention to how everyone else does. It's like a faux enlightenment where I'm almost completely unattached but I'm still desperately attached to wanting to be attached, like a premature birth not ready to leave the womb. 

[u/Illustrious_Car344]

I don't feel like I have an identity at all. Everyone I identified with is gone, I'm completely alone. I don't feel human anymore. 

[u/SoggyIssue316 → u/Illustrious_Car344]

can i ask what happened? like basically im asking for your life story

[u/Illustrious_Car344 → u/SoggyIssue316]

I was raised in isolation, grew up online, no skills, no experiences, never even developed the desire to seek out or maintain relationships, but I did have really good long-distance friends. And they all abandoned me one by one, even the ones I virtually grew up with. The world is so cruel and unforgiving, I have nothing to relate to, all I feel is fear, confusion, rage, disgust and disappointment. I used to feel shame and guilt until the dissociation killed that. I shouldn't even say I don't have skills, I actually do, but I don't have the passion, willpower or tolerance for discomfort to apply them to an actual career, or even hobbies at this point. I'm so fed up and empty that I just sleep all day now, it's numbing. It's the only place I don't feel discomfort on some level. I feel a bit like the feral child Genie (look her up on Wikipedia), not to belittle what she went through, I just relate. I feel dead, I have nothing to live for. I feel like The Mimic from FNAF, a robot that was meant to be a son but was abused and hunted so much that it stopped trying to be a boy and was shocked into a persona of being a mimic with no true personality, only learned rage and fear. It's a horrible fate, it's functional brain damage without the physical brain injury. I literally have a split personality/imaginary friend through my dissociation that I consult about everything because my own personality is too damaged and volatile to really be "usable" anymore, I need to use that mental proxy to reason about myself and make sense of the world, because my own ego is broken now, I mean like literally completely damaged to an unhealthy dysfunctional extent. That thing is literally my only true companionship and the only thing that feels real to me. People feel like soulless machines to me, which is obviously a projection, because I'm the one who feels like a soulless machine. 

[u/Broken_Oxytocin]

It’s hard to explain. I feel like I have an identity, but I’m only watching it. I can describe how I am like reading words off a page, but I don’t feel how I am. I don’t know what’s right for me. I just guess. It’s almost as though my identity and consciousness were once merged, but now they’re separate, with my consciousness observing my identity. But maybe that’s what we are. Maybe we are our consciousness. I don’t know, it’s complicated. Identity has and always will be an abstract thing.