You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

by Alan Noble

For all of us the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging, whether consciously accepted or unconsciously absorbed from culture, are experienced as perpetual inadequacy. Your life is never justified, you are always in the process of validating your existence. Your identity is never secure, you are always in the process of discovering and proclaiming and defining who you are. Meaning is never given; it is always being reinterpreted or reasserted. Values are never certain; they are always being renegotiated. And belonging is never attained; it is always dislocated. Society promises to provide us with the means to live full and satisfying lives through self-belonging, but these tools only increase our burdens by giving us new ways to work toward an unachievable goal. Social media offers to help us create and express our identities by giving us ever more tools for self-expression and promotion, but these tools only become more things for us to do. Technology always claims to be optional even as it becomes impractical to reject. The distinction between tools to facilitate self-belonging and tools to cope with our inability to belong to ourselves blurs the more we look at it. Do we take antidepressants to become our “true self” or to cope with our failure to become our true self? Do we shop for clothing to express our identity or as a form of therapy? Rhetorically and in marketing, strategies for self-actualization and coping often appear the same, using the same sales appeal and the ...