What was all that "be yourself" nonsense they fed us?

"Be yourself is all that you can be" — Shakespeare (but also Audioslave)

honestly, one of Robin Williams’ greatest roles

There’s this scene in the 1992 Disney cartoon Aladdin when the titular hero is trying to woo his lady love. It’s a classic set-up: a balcony scene with the pauper-turned-prince up there hoping to convince the princess that he’s royalty. But of course, the princess is over royalty, she’s bored of the suitors.

And so she shuts him down, pulls his turban over his head and tells him to jump off the balcony. And just at that moment, two things happen — A.) Aladdin realizes that his royalty gimmick isn’t working and B.) his personal genie-turned-bumblebee buzzes in his ear, giving him advice; the foremost of which is “just remember — bee yourself.”

I don’t know when I first saw that scene but, like everybody of a certain age, I watched Aladdin about a thousand times. And that bit always bothered me. Like, I thought about it regularly throughout my childhood. Because really? That’s how you get the girl? Just be yourself. What does that even mean?

This was a message that the Disney movies and PBS shows were constantly feeding us when we were kids: be yourself. And it wasn’t just about getting the girl. It was about everything. It was based on this idea that being yourself is the only secular way to live a happy and fulfilled life. And I don’t know, but I like to think that the people feeding us that line were well-meaning adults who believed they were giving us good advice.

In fact, they probably were giving us good advice. But it’s not as if be yourself was revelatory advice. In the second century, Marcus Aurelius built it into a whole philosophy, writing “this you must always bear in mind: what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how is this related to that?” And then there’s that scene in Hamlet where Polonius gives the exact same advice to his kid before he goes off to college, telling him “this above all: to thine own self be true.”

But Shakespeare didn’t think much of Polonius. After Hamlet kills him, he goes around ribbing the other players about where he’s hidden the corpse. And the Marcus Aurelius obsession among the whole pseudo-intellectual YouTube crowd with has made him, well, boring.

And then let’s be honest, when these people — be they Disney screenwriters¹ or the greatest minds our species has produced — were telling us this nonsense, it was partially because there isn’t any universal advice you can give a kid that stands up to all the problems the absurd world will throw at them. And so in many ways, be yourself is more cop-out than actionable guidance. It’s the Disney movies and Polonius saying, I really don’t know what will happen. All you can do is just make this shit up as you go along and try to be consistent. Because you’ll live a happier life if you’re living it on your terms rather than behaving as if you’re out to please other people.

But the real problem with telling a kid to be yourself — and the reason it was one of the consistent walls² of my childhood — is that when you’re a kid, you don’t know who you are. That’s part of what being a kid is about: figuring out who you are.

And this is a long way of saying that I’ve got a kid of my own now and I’m low-key freaking out about giving him the right advice at the right time. Like, I’m no psychologist but I’m pretty sure that your early memories and the first pieces of advice that break through to us as children have an outsized impact on the people we become. So, as a parent, I’ve noticed this kind of constant pressure to be on-my-game at all times because you never know what’s going to stick.

And because I’ve never been able to read more than twenty pages of those dadhood-for-dummies books, I’ve found myself instead obsessively reflecting on the advice I was given. I’ve been combing over all those things they told me and trying to figure out which of them are worth passing down to my own kid — I don’t want him to stress over the same advice that I lost sleep over as a child. And I’ve decided that be yourself needs some work.

Because the problem here is that be yourself implies the existence of an already defined sense of self. I’ve decided to change it to something like try (almost) everything — figure out who you are. And I know that’s not revelatory advice either. But at least it’s a little more actionable.

Here, here’s sort of an example of what I mean. It’s an example that feels kind of exclusive to my own life but maybe it’ll translate to yours — I was talking to my friend Sally recently about what we read in our lives and about how we read different sorts of things when we were in our teens and then again different things when we were in our twenties. And now that we’re in the first years of our third decade, we were trying to figure out what we should be reading.³

In your teens, you don’t know what to read. You just read whatever the adults in your life give you. Somebody gave me Hemingway and I liked it, so I read all of that. But somebody gave Sally a copy of Wuthering Heights and she had that thing for Heathcliff. So she read all of the Brontë sisters. But then at some point we started to explore. Because toward the end of your teenage years, you figure out what you enjoy reading and you go out and find it yourself. I stumbled across Kerouac and Bukowski. Sally got into Sylvia Plath. Then, in your twenties, you know what you like and while there is a pressure to read the “serious stuff” and the contemporary hits — you just kind of put that off. Like why do I have to read Jung or Margaret Atwood? That shit wasn’t cool to me. I was reading things I believed were cool. Didion and Camus and Carver and Donna Tartt.

Then you hit your thirties and you know what you like. Sure, you stray outside your tastes occasionally. You might read something like Fleishman is in Trouble but then you find yourself laughing at it (because, let’s be real, the only way you can’t cringe at that book is to laugh at it). Or you might read something newish like Fates & Furies and get all obsessed with it. But you know what you like well enough to not feel the pressure you felt in your twenties — the pressure to read outside your tastes. You decide life is too short for bad books (even subjectively bad ones) and it’s not worth reading bad books just because everybody else is reading them.

This isn’t just about books though, it’s just about figuring out who you are. Whether you’re a person who likes books or going to church or NFL games or drag shows or monster truck rallies. You figure out where your moral center is (or you don’t), you define enough of the things around you, enough of the nature of the whole to put yourself in it.

And it’s not until around this age that you stop stressing about be yourself. It’s not until you’re years past Disney movies that you have a self to be.

1. nothing wrong with Disney screenwriters btw. one of the smartest people I know around here is a Disney screenwriter. they seem to be a sharp crowd.

2. I don’t remember where but somewhere —it feels like Simone Weil but it also feels like Plato or maybe Descartes? — there’s this metaphor for how we come up against things in life and struggle against them as if they were walls. We walk along them, try to figure out a way through them. And that’s how my brain thinks about some problems, some unique to me and some that your brain probably walks up-and-down too, like the problem of evil.

3. I’ve notice a common fear among people who read because they feel that they have to — we’re terrified that we’ll eventually run out of books to read. Like, I mean, good books. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein talks about “rationing her books.” Hemingway said it his Paris Review interview too. But (like a lot of things) he stole it from her.