FAQ
The following Q&A covers key themes from my new book Will the Future Like You? The book explores the hidden costs to the psyche from living online. If you’re struggling with a foggy sense of self, chronic self doubt, or identity confusion you may find answers here.
By now we know that online life—its endless content, algorithm-fueled polarization, and pressure to publicly present one’s self—is detrimental to our well-being; countless books and articles have dissected these various angles. But WILL THE FUTURE LIKE YOU? argues that the damage goes even deeper. You make the case that the ability to form and sustain one’s identity is itself being eroded. Can you speak to why this is so urgent?
We form identity in three ways: how we see ourselves, how others see us, and our will to shape ourselves. And we develop it by testing it against the wider world. But with the internet, that world hasn’t just been enlarged, but blown completely open, its boundaries obliterated. The once-contained arenas where our identities formed—the neighborhood, school, or workplace—have been radically expanded to the entirety of the digital realm, including the dark web, QAnon, and 4chan, alongside mainstream platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
This is identity formation under conditions of hyper-connectivity—infinite inputs, infinite possible selves. The coherent self requires boundaries to form against. Remove them, and identity becomes liquid, unsecured, and endlessly revisable.With fewer boundaries in the current culture, we’re pushed in the opposite direction: hyper-reinvention. To stay relevant, employable, and visible, we must constantly adapt, rebrand, and perform new versions of ourselves. The question at every crossroad is no longer “What should I do?” but “Who am I?”
You quote Christopher Lasch’s book The Culture of Narcissism, in which he states “every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology.” You argue that “persona fog” is the problem of our era. Can you explain this concept and how it emerged?
Carl Jung conceptualized the persona as the “social” part of us—the interface between the self and the outside world. It’s the mask we wear, the part of you that knows how to be professional in a meeting or charming at a party. It’s useful for getting around in the world, but it’s not a replacement for inner stability and self-understanding.
Persona fog is a feeling of identity disorientation, caused by living too much on the surface of ourselves. Everything digital faces outward. Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, places where we “express who we are” are all performance stages—which means much of how we see ourselves is now defined by our audience. Identity has become so performative, so relentlessly focused on external validation, that the inner realm—the deeper part of you that generates meaning, purpose, and direction—is being demoted. Living in this “inverted” way—with your persona taking a defining role for many years—is not without consequence.
You weave together fields as far-ranging as history, neuroscience, literature, and Jungian thought. In drawing on such varied disciplines, what perspectives did you gain on the costs of living virtually?
The study of identity demands breadth because identity itself doesn’t respect disciplinary boundaries. It’s engaged with neurobiology, social structures, symbolic systems, and inherited archetypes to form who we are. To understand how identity is being disrupted now, I had to look at what it was built on—and what’s collapsing.
When I compared the experiences of people living today against the standards held by these far-ranging fields, I could see gaps opening up. Our contemporary ideas about identity no longer fit the frames of those traditions. And making so many comparisons only made the contours of these gaps clearer. That’s what I tried to map: the moment when the rhythm of existence changed, when the old frameworks no longer fit, signaling that we must find a new way to answer the age-old question, Who am I?
Authoritarian movements often draw followers whose sense of self has been destabilized by crisis or social upheaval—their vulnerability creates fertile ground for indoctrination. Many observers note that the MAGA movement functions less as a political affiliation than as an identity, its strength rooted in the way it occupies the core of its adherents’ selves. How does your research on the persona’s role connect to these contemporary political dynamics?
I don’t raise Nazi Germany lightly; Jung watched that dictatorship emerge in real time and his assessment is still relevant today. He argued that German identity was tied to authoritarian archetypes in the collective unconscious, gods of war and wisdom, which implied a cruel infallibility. The crucial insight? Post-WWI defeat hadn’t created an identity void that Nazis could fill: it had wounded a collective identity. When the dictator appeared, the public was already primed and he was instantly magnetic on an unconscious level.
This distinction matters. We often assume dictators give their followers identity, a sense of belonging to fill a void. Jung argued the opposite: they validate an identity already present but repressed, shamed, or ignored. The dictator doesn’t fill a void—he names what people already feel but weren’t able to say. He becomes a demigod permitted to override individual thought and action, and indeed gives his followers permission to stop thinking for themselves. Jung called fascism “the collective shadow,” a society’s refusal to face its own darkness, fears, and insecurities until avoidance festers into an epidemic.
Jung’s prescription? Individuation. Do the painful work of confronting your own shadow, reflecting on who you really are, instead of hiding behind myriad personas. This effort makes us resistant to mass movements led by demagogues. A self-aware public is less likely to fall for dictators.
Human identity is complicated and multi-faceted; we’ve always formed multiple personas depending on context—professional, romantic, platonic, and familial. But today’s pressure to maintain a single online identity across different contexts creates a new dilemma. To what extent does this drive persona fog? And how does the built-in need for immediate affirmation via “likes” make our sense of self even more fragile?
There are two forces dismantling our sense of self in the digital age: fragmentation and validation-seeking. With the first, we scatter pieces of ourselves across platforms—our professional selves on LinkedIn, our highlight reel on Instagram, our hot takes on Twitter, our vulnerable confessions on Reddit. We become fragmented and therefore vulnerable people. With the second, if you have a desperate craving for validation, you hand your audience veto power over which version of yourself you’re allowed to be. When there’s no internal center anchoring your identity, you become a weathervane, spinning with every gust of public opinion.
Or worse, you silence yourself. You sense something interesting in yourself—a weird passion, an unconventional thought, a possible future identity—and you kill it before it has a chance to express itself because you’re already imagining the crickets, the ratio, the trolling. You’ve handed your personal potential over to an imaginary jury. This is where the widespread sense of “stuckness” comes from.
We tell ourselves it doesn’t matter, that what happens “out there” on our screens isn’t happening “in here,” within us. But every time we edit ourselves for an audience, every time we choose the safe version over the true version, we’re making a choice about who we become and then re-enforcing it with every post. The self we perform eventually becomes the self we inhabit.
This damage is doubly powerful given our wider circumstance: We’re living through ferocious upheaval. Society is destabilizing, changing at speeds we’ve never experienced. To navigate this kind of chaos, you need a coherent sense of who you are. But if you’ve outsourced your identity to the crowd, if you’re just fragments held together by approval, then you have no ballast. You’re trying to weather a hurricane with no anchor.
You wrote the book amid a period of personal reevaluation—an abrupt divorce, a sudden job loss, and your child coming out as trans. How did living through these identity-shaking moments sharpen your understanding of technology’s destabilizing effects?
Within a few years my roles as wife, mother, daughter, neighbor, and professional were all upended. Doing the hard work of reclaiming my sense of self while immersed in digital culture showed me firsthand how rickety that fragmented structure is for building—or rebuilding—a solid identity. I wasn’t just studying this phenomenon. I was living it, or should I say stumbling through it.
I also felt it was important to be transparent about this. My research was rigorous, but wasn’t purely empirical; it was also deeply personal. I had to trust that revealing my personal story wouldn’t weaken the work—instead it was a source of insight.
Given its harms, can technology still help us explore ourselves and shape who we become? How might we use it to enrich our lives rather than diminish them?
I encountered some people who were using online platforms differently: as a space to explore who they are and want to become. They were experimenting with their identity on purpose, and over time, they stopped caring about likes, comments, or how many people were paying attention. They were after something else: the chance to try out different versions of themselves with full awareness to see for themselves what felt true.
They proved that technology can help us explore and shape ourselves in positive ways—but only if we’re conscious about doing so. Are we just letting the algorithm and the scroll and the dopamine hits shape us without realizing it? Or are we actively choosing how we show up, with a clear sense of what these platforms can and can’t give us? When guided by these questions, we can avoid social media’s built-in traps—the pressure to perform, the addiction to validation, the way it flattens complex people into simple one-dimensional presentations. We can stay in control of our stories, using the internet as a tool for exploration rather than letting it write the script for us. What matters is whether we’re paying attention—whether we understand what we’re doing and why, or whether we’re just along for the ride.