I think when you're little, figuring this stuff out helps you figure out yourself. Affiliation helps you build out your identity. Most of us don't have an opini

I think when you're little, figuring this stuff out helps you figure out yourself. Affiliation helps you build out your identity. Most of us don't have an opinion about everything. The group identity can help you figure out what questions are worth asking and suggest answers. As you grow, I think you need less and less of it. I still self-identify in ways that I don't actively practice. But more and more I think of my identity as an accident of circumstance populated by an accidental consciousness without much that makes it unique except my particular ordering of vices. I also don't see what making a big show of belonging would buy me now, in a world so completely ambiguous and shaded in grey that it feels like any positive statement can be twisted into some horror and our only refuge is a constant state of agreeable equivocation. Maybe if enough of us see it this way, we can turn this perspective into a stylistic pre-designation and await an enriching conformity.