The construct and the self

I once found myself sitting in a rather dark room, almost featureless — where a single dim light dangled from the ceiling.

It swung gently, and casted shifting shadows on the table that stood between me and the entity across the room.

Familiar isn’t it?

This constant bargain between self and construct.

On one side sits self, the purest sense of who we might be, stripped of pretense. On the other side is the construct — amorphous, yet, this imposing force defines the parameters of our very experience, shaping the contours of our lives like the walls of a room.

And within that room where identity is weighed against the framework of reality, our self sits across the table from the construct, perpetually negotiating — not in grand gestures but in a thousand tiny decisions, compromises, and acts of compliance.

This is where I believe life shows itself to be a balance — possibly not between authenticity and inauthenticity, but between degrees of concession and preservation.

This bargain, I think, is the rent of existence — and the currency is self.

For every moment we assert self over construct, there is a price — perhaps alienation, perhaps turmoil. Conversely, for every time we surrender self for the comfort of alignment with the construct, there is a quiet erosion of what we once thought was our essence.

Maybe this is the essence of the bargain: that each choice is a trade-off, a reconfiguration of identity.

Yet, my dilemma remains: what is true self? or perhaps, what is fulfilment, within this grand blip of an existence?

Is “true self” that which we cling to — our inner voice, our deepest desires — an essence waiting to be expressed, or is it simply the residue of how much we’ve yielded to the construct?

And if so, what then is fulfilment? Or perhaps “true self” may be as much a construct as the construct itself?

If the “true self” is indeed, an elusive ideal— a construct in itself, perhaps fulfillment isn’t found in the chasing of that which is illusory.

What if it lied in the mastery of the art of the bargain? The defining of one’s own balance between self-expression and compromise.

Just maybe, fulfillment is not as much as about being wholly true to self, but rather retaining enough self to feel alive yet concede enough to exist within construct’s bounds.

And so, maybe the quest becomes finding peace in the bargain we make every day — with ourselves, with the world, with the construct. Perhaps, the satisfaction of knowing that while we may not be able to escape the bargain, we can at least learn to navigate it with a sense of agency.

That, I think, is as close to fulfillment as we can get.