Why am “I”?
For almost eight years, the one single particular question has followed me all around… That is “why are humans like this? (in the sense, behavior, habits and characterizes!!!)”
I thought the question was a silly and personal question. As I started reading lots of works and paying attention to some, gave me a realization that people like Buddha had been also revolving the same thing that was thousands of years ago. My question was only one thread. Pull it out and the whole web comes with it, what life is? what its purpose might be? what consciousness is? and a lot more I’m still finding my path through there. That’s further story.
When we watch how we live and look for the some pattern under it, and finally connected the dots and concluded with one word “INDIVIDUALISM”.
Humans had became the most (so-called-)powerful species on this planet, why because we constantly think about ourselves. That sense of “I” is embed to consciousness and it has driven almost everything we have built until now.
Like even when we try to build a super-intelligent machines, we are trying to copy that same individual mind into something new.
There is also a simple and classical reason for it. Humans are “social” animals. We survived by depending on each other and for a long time that meant working together. Then as technology started to arrive and saved us time, so we could have more room for art, craft and ideas. Slowly, the same technology removed the need of dependence on the peers around us. We got comfortable standing alone.
[If you have heard about the story of Sony Walkman arrival era, where people would wear earphones and listen to music and stay alone from the society. This is the real proof, where the people started to annoy by the action and disagreed with the technologies.]
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Now many of us feel lonely, and it is hard to find a friend who hasn’t said so at least once. I’ve heard that young people in Japan and China shut themselves away and sometimes d*e alone. (Spotted at the lonely shut door after weeks and months…) That is a story for another day, but it belongs to the same web.
Close your eyes and listen to your own (inner-)voice for just a minute. It speaks in I, me and my. Every one of us is the hero of our own book. Like anything good, this has a limit, and when it crosses that limit, it starts to cost the people around us.
You can see it on the smallest scale where a neighbour just throws garbage onto the street, by realizing that his own house is clean now and that is where his thinking. He forgets that the street is shared. Even he pays tax so that someone will clean it. This same thought is sitting behind the person who drives drunk, takes phone calls while driving, drives rashly, picks fights or throws abuse at a stranger and anything you think un-civil act. The thought is always “me first, and the rest is not my problem.” Call it individualism or call it ego. It is the same thing.
Even some of us always overthink like “am I correct?”, “”am I not troubling anyone”, “does he looking at me?” and so on. This phenomenon is called as “The Spotlight Effect”, but the fact is that the person next to you thinks about himself rather than you. That is also an psychological condition, we can encounter sometimes.
Even we cut a tree to make a table for our house, and the table is ours, so it feels like a fair trade. We rarely ask what that tree held up: the soil, the birds, the air, the lives we will never see. We got a table, and everything else became someone else’s problem.
This is where my mind goes next, and where I think the real danger sits. If individualism is this strong in a single person, what does it do to a whole society? Democracy depends on people thinking beyond themselves, voting for the shared good and not only for what benefits them today. A society full of people who ask only “what’s in it for me?” can still hold elections and call itself a democracy, but it will slowly stop working the way it was meant to. I think this is how democracy can fail, quietly and with everyone’s participation.
I don’t think individualism is the enemy. It gave us curiosity, freedom, and the courage to question everything, including the question I started with. But I think we have lost the balance between “I” and “we,” and we are only beginning to feel the consequences.
I don’t have the answer yet, and I’m not sure anyone does. But I’d rather keep asking honestly than pretend the question doesn’t matter. Maybe the Buddha was asking the same thing, in his own way, all along.
If this made you think of something in your own life or your own street, I’d like to hear it.
Harsha Vardhan (a.k.a, HarVa) — 13th November of 2026
