Who

If no complete system exists, then who is "you"?

You are doing something everyone agrees is right, living a life that looks good, but there's always a faint voice in your heart asking: is this really what I wanted? Looking back, even at the happiest experiences, you feel as if you're watching a movie about someone else. This very feeling exposes that the subject is not those contents themselves. Scores, rankings, résumés are all “content”. Whether they represent you always falls just a little short. Because you are that negative empty slot which can be filled with content yet never coincides with it.

This is the fundamental reason the systematic judging has no authority to answer who you are. The measurement in its hand always measures content, and you are not only content.

We also rarely ask "who am I" when everything is going smoothly, our identity is stable, and our memory is continuous — we simply live inside our habits. It's rather when something goes wrong — suddenly losing memory, discovering that what you always firmly believed turns out to be false, being forced to leave a familiar environment — that we begin to ask. This is why advancing to a new school, moving, or changing jobs is so stressful.