All the stars are projectors...projecting our lives down to this planet Earth

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes people who they are. I wonder how many things you would have to take away from the modern person before they lose their sense of identity. If they were removed from family and close relationships, then stripped of their job, financial stability, and then the ability to enjoy hobbies, how would they survive in a conversation with the rest of us? Would we even be able to hold a ten-minute conversation with them, or would most of us quickly lose interest or start talking about ourselves? Without a sense of uniqueness (which ironically seems to come from the ability to be classified in an exciting way), how does the modern ego survive? What if you continued to take things away; safety, health, a sense of future, or even a person’s dreams for making any kind of difference… Without an outlet for the passions and causes that drive us and give us purpose, what would most of us become? Are all of these things – hobbies, interests, jobs, relationships, etc. - a conduit through which we express a personality that is already there, or do we actually find our identity in what we do and have? For the average person, after stripping all of these things away, what is left underneath? Is that the one thing we all have in common?

Ruminatively,
Kristy