who's in a name?

While skirting the edges of the Blaugust 2025 community¹, I came across this post by Krikket. It caught my attention because I've been effectively juggling three(ish) separate names/identities for a few years now, and this blog is partially meant to be both a synthesis and a stepping away from some of those as my priorities and worldview have shifted. The full story is a bit more complicated, but I'm going to give a simplified version that focuses specifically on my online identities before delving into the abstract a little bit.

Basically, at this point I have two online identities. One is the Thelosopher thing you see here (which I have mostly tied to my real name), and the other is what I came up with in early high school. That high school name has my Discord², my Steam, my Twitch, and had my Twitter/other social media accounts before I deleted them. Over the past couple of years, I've been souring on big tech more and more, which made hobbies like streaming on Twitch seem less and less like something I wanted to continue. As I was slowly moving away from these big platforms, I had a mini-crisis of what to do with that old high school identity. All this stuff I've been doing is a pretty big shift from how I used to present myself online, and I felt kind of like I was bait-and-switching people who followed that account by doing something completely different out of nowhere. I don't like the feeling of imposing or tricking other people, and regardless of what the reality is it really felt like that is what I was doing³. Additionally, I wasn't super torn up about giving up my high school identity because looking back it's pretty childish. I feel like I can do a lot better now than I could then, and so having a clean-slate reset was attractive on its own.

People are dynamic. You talk to someone and then talk with them 5 minutes later and, in some small way, they're different. Knowing people irl⁴, you see that shift happen slowly over time. You see a friend who's growing their hair out have their hair slowly get longer every time you meet them, you see the friend who's on a fitness streak slowly get in better shape, you see the friend who just got a stressful job slowly look more and more tired, examples exist everywhere. Something that moving half-way across the world has made me notice (and maybe this is just me projecting) is that the human mind doesn't handle physical and temporal difference well. Every time I go visit family in the States I somehow expect that nobody has changed even though I know very well they have. It's like my picture of them, devoid of any real information, stays static rather than even guessing at potential growth. From what I can tell, most online interaction has the same problem where identities (and the names we use to express them) have a lot harder of a time growing and shifting.

Imagine a tree. It has a certain color based on the way light hits it and what the weather is at that very moment, and it grows and changes over time with some branches dying and some new ones appearing. If you're standing in front of the tree you may notice these changes, but your brain has no difficulty recognizing it as the same tree it's always been. Now imagine you're instead given a picture of a part of a tree and then only get another picture of it however many months or years later from another angle, with another lens, of a different part of the tree, and during a different season. I'd reckon it's entirely possible that you'd have a difficult time knowing it's the same tree, and even if you intellectually figured that out it still wouldn't feel like the same tree.

Let's get even funkier: this time imagine you are the tree. You have people taking random pictures of you during summer, fall, and winter and a few others who just come by every so often to sit in your shade. Then, in comes spring and your flowers bloom just like they were always going to. Enter a mob of people completely confused on where the flowers came from. Some of them only ever got pictures of the trunk and they didn't even know you had branches. Others only got pictures of your dying and dead branches and never thought you'd make anything beautiful ever again. Others still got pictures of you during a dreary day in the middle of winter and are shocked at all the different colors. Meanwhile, you and the people who've stuck around just see all of it as the passage of time and changing of seasons.

People are far to complicated to fit into boxes. Even if you manage to construct one which can contain you for a while, eventually you'll start spilling out. Names ideally are signposts which point in the direction of who we are (wherever that may be at the moment), but unfortunately they can also quickly become boxes. When that happens, we can either try and expand our identity or we can shed it like a snake does their skin and grow into a new one. The former has the benefit of more straightforward continuity for both ourselves and people following our story, but the ladder leaves behind husks that can act as snapshots of who we used to be, ghosts of our former selves. I haven't myself decided which solution I like better and have adopted both multiple times, but either way I think it's important to recognize change as an important part of the human experience. Heck, it might even be a big part of what makes humanity so special.

As you do.^
Which is my excuse for not joining the Blaugust discord. My actual reason is that I don't think my blog is good enough neither in content nor presentation to justify participation, but we're not going to get into that right now since imposter syndrome is still a work-in-progress for me and is beyond the scope of this post.^
This fear is almost certainly irrational, but I just can't quite seem to shake it.^
Or via continuous and personal interaction online.^