From Social Function to Psychological Identity Work
Social realities rarely felt stable to me. Many forms of social life struck me as both real and artificial. Family, school, work, or community operated through shared language, shared values, and shared roles. Yet behavior, expectations, and actual social dynamics often felt deeply contradictory.
These contradictions unsettled me in ways that were never purely intellectual. Thought and emotion never felt fully separate to me. Behind almost every argument, I sensed needs, fears, insecurities, or attempts to make inner tensions feel manageable — including my own. That is why arguments rarely convince me quickly. Not because I reject change, but because rational explanation, emotional resonance, and the underlying impulse have to feel at least somewhat coherent.
Better wording or more precise language can only help to a limited extent because communication is based on individual life experiences. Often, we ourselves are only partially aware of our own motives. That does not make understanding impossible, but fragile.
The more I tried to understand social systems, the more I saw the fragility of these shared realities. Communities have to build shared realities in order to remain capable of acting at all. Language, values, rituals, roles and social norms provide guidance and reduce complexity. Without such simplifications, collective life would probably be virtually impossible.
But this is precisely where I feel a strange tension emerging. Our shared reality appears stable, whilst beneath the surface something comes adrift. People experience the same situations differently. They interpret relationships differently. They associate different experiences with the same terms. And yet societies must still function.
It was particularly when interacting with other people that I realised just how brittle shared points of reference become under such circumstances. What gives one person a sense of security may cause stress for another. What is meant as responsibility can be perceived as control. What one person sees as closeness may feel overwhelming to another, or like a loss of autonomy.
The terms remain the same, but the realities behind them often vary considerably. And frequently, even these internal points of reference are contradictory, unstable, or only feel coherent in certain situations. Nevertheless, social life constantly creates pressure to treat them as unambiguous and stable.
Furthermore, modern social experiences are becoming increasingly diverse. Even within the same society, people grow up under very different social, emotional and cultural conditions. As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain any stable common points of reference at all.
People are expected to be individual, authentic and independent, yet at the same time they must remain socially compatible.
And that is precisely where I began to feel a deeper sense of unease.
I increasingly felt that modern societies have little functional need for genuine individual diversity. Small communities were presumably much more reliant on different perceptions, abilities and characters. Different people could fulfil specific functions: guidance, protection, emotional stabilisation, risk-taking, creativity or social mediation. Individuality was not primarily a psychological self-description, but a lived function within a shared struggle for survival.
Significance emerged organically from this.
When someone was absent, the community did not merely miss a person, but a specific skill or perspective.
Modern systems operate differently. Many functions that were previously necessary at a local or individual level have been organised on a systemic scale: security, food, knowledge, orientation, communication and social order. This also alters the social function of individuality.
These systems still require individual skills, creativity and emotional competence — but primarily in forms that remain compatible, predictable and economically integrable. Large-scale technical and economic structures rely on adaptability, emotional self-regulation and comparability in order to remain operational.
This gives rise to a paradox of modern individuality. People are expected to be individual, authentic and autonomous, but only insofar as these qualities do not destabilise the system itself. Individuality is tolerated or even encouraged as long as it remains compatible, consumable or marketable.
Even fields that deal directly with human individuality — medicine, care, therapy or education — are increasingly embedded in systems that require measurability, standardisation and comparability. Large-scale systems require comparability, standardisation and functional compatibility in order to remain operational at all. At the same time, it is precisely this form of systemic order that can be subjectively experienced as constricting or an implicit rejection of individual reality. Forms of human perception, emotionality or identity that are difficult to measure or integrate seem to be losing their immediate social relevance.
The more individuality generates real friction, challenges norms or destabilises existing realities, the greater the pressure to conform, rationalise or psychologise.
Perhaps this is precisely what my own sense of lost significance is connected to. The more I have tried to take my own perceptions seriously, the more difficult functional integration has become. Not because this kind of individuality is forbidden, but because modern systems are structurally ill-equipped to deal with certain forms of genuine variance.
For me, this is a major source of modern exhaustion. Not just from stress or the pressure to perform, but from the constant psychological effort required to keep conflicting realities stable at the same time. I am increasingly convinced that this inner fragmentation is not the exception in modern societies, but their fundamental state. Stabilisation is the constant response to it.
Language attempts to stabilise. Roles attempt to stabilise. Relationships attempt to stabilise. Therapy attempts to stabilise. Identities attempt to stabilise. Self-optimisation attempts to stabilise. This does not mean that these things are worthless. Much of it remains necessary. At the same time, many of these forms are losing their original foundations.
Language requires, at least in part, shared spaces of experience. Roles require concrete social or existential functions. Relationships require a sufficiently stable shared reality. Even therapeutic or psychological models reach their limits when structural tensions must primarily be processed on an individual level.
This often creates a sense of perpetual treatment without any real resolution of the underlying causes. Modern societies stabilise many consequences of internal and societal fragmentation without actually being able to resolve their fundamental tensions.
A fundamental dilemma emerges from this. Suffering is experienced individually, even though its causes may, in part, be structural. Treatment must therefore almost inevitably focus on the individual, even when suffering does not feel entirely self-generated.
The causes of many tensions appear diffuse, widespread and structural, whilst the scope for action remains predominantly individual. This easily gives rise to a sense of continual stabilisation without any real resolution. The treatment of suffering and its underlying causes seem to move increasingly further apart.
For me, this is also connected to the feeling many people have of being alienated or incompatible. Not necessarily because they are objectively excluded, but because their subjective experience does not seem capable of stable integration within shared social realities. The message society usually sends is: “Your experience is wrong.” What is often meant instead, however, is: “Your experience is not compatible.”
That does not mean that earlier societies were better. Many were brutal, narrow and oppressive. But relevance often arose there more concretely from a lived function within a community.
Nowadays, people are expected to be autonomous, flexible, authentic and socially compatible all at once. Relevance no longer arises naturally from lived function. It increasingly has to be psychologically stabilised.
That is why this topic preoccupies me so much. Not out of a longing for past societies, but because of the question of how, under conditions of increasing inner fragmentation, genuine community can still emerge that feels at once real, stable and free.
For me, the real tragedy of modern societies does not lie in the disappearance of shared reality. Rather, it lies in the fact that the effort required to keep diverging realities compatible with one another seems to grow the further those realities drift apart.
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