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It would be interesting to look at what people find salient, what identities they inhabit, in different times. I imagine a colonial governer in India would draw on that tradition of 'Great Englishman'. All of these kind of identities, nationhood, ancestry identities seem to have a strong component of fortifying myth, while other identities are perhaps just closer to roles, eg engineer, internet troll etc. Which is not to contrast or make any particular point except to try to tease 'identity' out a bit.
My point was more around how we don't typically have good language to describe our moment by moment experience as a Self and what that encompasses. From religious traditions and phenomenological philosophers, cognitive science, we actually have a rich model and language of direct experience, but this hasn't made it into the public space.
I mean existence is actually pretty weird. For example it's possible to find yourself in fairly uncertain states about what is actually happening in moment to moment consciousness and life and our interactions with others can be coloured by a certain weirdness. While we can often retreat to a sensible perspective of ego, or small self, with our identities, beliefs, and homoncular experience, we also may be plunged into existential anxiety and shifting reality.
I think the failure to communicate this reality underequips young people to appreciate that they might have difficult, uncomfortable experiences where they don't feel like a coherent whole. They might mistake this as a kind of mismatch, where something is wrong with them, and search for a path of certainty by over attaching to an identity they can perform.
I very much agree with the weirdness of human experience. I sometimes find it so strange, that I seriously wonder whether reality is really all that real.
I am glad that I know that my family understands this and I will try to show my future children that having even unsettling weird experiences is a normal part of human condition.
I am formulating a post on this. I'm thinking that the branding, or framing, of strangeness or weirdness might not be a great draw, but nonetheless there is a great potential uniter in a better description of how we actually experience reality. Of course religious people are already playing in this space, but this always requires some extra beliefs.
For me, this sense of reality, which as you describe can include a feeling of unreality, has been the starting point to a notion of God, but a God akin the Spinoza's God, ie God as the 'other' or the universe. The universe is somehow unfolding in front of us and while quite strange is also magical. It takes me out of the plain scientific frame of my specific beliefs and thoughts running around my brain and into some other space.
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