Oscar Wilde once famously said, “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.” 

Then, Ralph Waldo Emerson added, “Be yourself, even when your voice shakes, even when your truth feels inconvenient, because a life built on pretending will always feel like a house you can’t fully rest in.”

And then, apparently, “be yourself” even became a verb (Or so does the Shift Your Perspective pin claim on Pinterest) meaning, “Just be who you want to be, not what others want to see.”

I remember being in middle school and discovering these boards on Pinterest for the first time… Saving and reposting them to seem “cool” and “different” from the rest of the teenagers… But what I didn’t realize at the time was that firstly, thousands of others were doing the same on their profiles, ironically eliminating my goals from the very beginning. And secondly, these snippets from world-renowned writers like Oscar Wilde or random pages from the internet like Shift Your Perspective or Psychology Today meant nothing for myself, its definition, expression, or relation to others. 

Eventually, I found my way from Pinterest back to the real world, and as many other young adults, experienced various existential crises regarding my identity construction. At times, I lacked clarity and confidence in what my core values or priorities were in life. Other times, I lacked direction and certainty of what the future – career and family-wise – would hold for me. And recently, I just realized that… I have too many selves. 

Reading that will definitely feel weird (especially if you’ve watched a lot of True Crime like me and know about the Dissociative Identity Disorder), but once you hear the cultural psychology framing behind it, you may even relate! 

Self-construals

In 1991, Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama proposed that people across cultures don’t just have different personalities, but different architectures of selfhood. 

The independent self-construal – the dominant model across the U.S. and much of Western Europe – treats the self as a fixed, bounded unit that exists prior to any relationship. There’s an inherent assumption that underneath all of the different social roles one carries throughout their life, there’s one stable, private, and noticeably, unique self. The relationships that follow, professional and personal, are simply either expressions or distortions of this self. 

This is what “be yourself” quotes quietly ask to locate: strip away the audience and the authentic you will definitely be waiting there! And it shows up in how someone’s behavior is explained or interpreted, as well. The Fundamental Attribution Error, a term popularized by Lee Ross, conveniently excuses your own behavior with external circumstances, while simultaneously overemphasizing another person’s character traits to judge their actions without any of the same situational factors. If you rudely cut someone off in a traffic jam, you justify it by thinking you are late to an important meeting. However, if another driver cuts you off, you instantly assume they are a reckless, selfish person. Even in situations where you may not be directly affected by the other person’s actions, the dispositional attribution of their behavior remains: “She said that because she is a blunt person” or “He left because he is the type who runs”. The traits come first, the context – later (or mostly, never even mentioned). 

The interdependent self-construal, on the other hand, is closer to how selfhood is architectured across much of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and I would argue, the Caucasus region. There is no private self behind the relational ones waiting to be discovered. The “self” is relational by its definition, built through bonds with family, friends, community, and social occupations. Hence, there’s no “real you” floating around that needs to be expressed openly or defended fearlessly. 

This is also one of the reasons why in these regions “Just be yourself” or “Never change for anyone else” could land not only as strange, but straight up rude. Here, adjusting yourself to fit the people around you isn’t a form of betrayal, but what self, as socially understood, naturally does. In Japan, there’s even a proverb that warns against non-conformity to this norm, stating “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down”. In Ubuntu cultures, notably within the indigenous communities of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, shared existence of the self is embedded with phrases such as, “A person is a person through other people”. And in the Caucasus, with countries like Georgia, we may not have non-conformity to this level, but the language still keeps the score with interconnectedness. For instance, the word “self” does not have a single, standalone equivalent in Georgian. There’s only “მე” [Me] translating to “I” and “შენ” [Shen] meaning “You”. If I wanted to describe “Myself”, I’d have to merge two separate words together, arguably sounding unnatural and forced, like “ჩემი თავი” [Chemi tavi] literally translating to “My head”.

The Missing Variable

Yet, even this framing no longer captures the full tension of identity construction in the 21st century. Self-construals explain the difference between cultures, but they assume that everyone grows up perfectly inside a singular one, absorbing a coherent structure of the “self” without being interrupted by external influences. The reality for current generations, especially for Gen Z and Millenials, is way messier. 

Nowadays, your sense of self may be tied to your native language, family structure, and level of interdependence described above, but it is also heavily defined by what you have consumed online. If a Georgian teenager watches the same shows, listens to the same artists, and shares the same boards on Pinterest as their peers in Berlin or San Francisco, the gap between their architectures of selfhood significantly shrinks, and creates a new, globalized identity structure. 

Neither Here Nor There

Thankfully, psychologists who study bicultural individuals have come up with a term for what has been happening since the 2000s: frame-switching. 

Hong, Morris, Chiu and Benet-Martinez established the empirical foundation for viewing culture as a loose network of knowledge rather than a monolithic mindset, leading to their “in-between” identity structure. Turns out, human brains can separate highly organized cultural meaning systems, and when exposed to a specific cue, instinctively and instantly switch their interpretive lenses, behavior, or values to match it! And for the majority of young people today, this isn’t just an interesting discovery. It’s our regular Tuesday. We may switch from texting our very collectivistic, interdependent family in native slang to writing an academic paper in English that demands individualistic, democratic opinion stated clearly and definitively. Then, we may go out with friends of multiple ethnicities and cultures, switching between two or three languages, talking about social media trends and listening to global Spotify hits, as if it’s all part of our identity. And then, we may come back and watch a highly niche Irish tv show that may have nothing to do with our upbringing or current lifestyle, but somehow still feels relatable. 

None of this is a performance. None of these versions of the “self” is more authentic than the others. They change and evolve constantly based on our internal operating systems, external environments, and social demands. This is why the saying “just be yourself” is fundamentally missing something… It’s not bad advice, but it does assume a fixed answer to a question that, for a lot of us, was naturally never going to resolve into one. Which you is the real you? Well, it depends on the architecture that has built this “you”, and if there’s more than one or two, good luck fitting into conventional definitions of a person. 

So maybe the updated version of the saying should be “Know your different self-construals and trust yourself enough to switch between them without losing touch with the others”… but that’s not really Pinterest-worthy, is it?