How much do I matter?
How much space am I allowed to take?
Where does my responsibility to myself end, and my responsibility to others begin?
If these questions feel familiar, that’s because they structure modern life. We ask them quietly while scrolling, loudly in moments of conflict, and obsessively when trying to make sense of who we are supposed to be. What’s surprising is not that we’re asking them—but that people were asking them nearly three thousand years ago, in port cities along the Aegean Sea.
The poets of archaic Greece—Sappho, Archilochus, Alcaeus—were among the first to treat the self as something worth examining. Not just a role or a destiny, but an interior force: volatile, emotional, ambitious, afraid. In many ways, they were inventing the problem we now live inside.
The Self Was Born in Public
The modern myth of the self is that it is private, internal, and best discovered alone. The archaic Greeks believed the opposite. The self emerged in public, through interaction, friction, performance.
Their cities were trade hubs: crowded, unstable, full of strangers and shifting alliances. Identity could not be fixed. Who you were depended on who you were with—at a feast, on a ship, in a political faction. The self was real, but it was relational.
This matters now because we live in a similar environment. Our “cities” are digital as well as physical, but they are just as fluid. Social media collapses private and public life into a single space where identity is constantly negotiated. We are encouraged to express ourselves, but also judged, categorized, and flattened in real time.
Like the archaic poets, we experience ourselves as both intensely personal and profoundly exposed.
Confidence, Anxiety, and the Performance of Self
What’s striking about archaic lyric poetry is how emotionally unstable it is. The speakers swing between pride and insecurity, desire and grief, bravado and vulnerability. They want to matter. They want to be seen. They are terrified of loss—of love, of status, of belonging.
That emotional oscillation feels painfully modern.
Today, we are told to be confident, authentic, self-possessed. At the same time, we live under constant evaluation. Metrics—likes, views, productivity, “impact”—hover over our sense of worth. The result is a self that is always performing and always unsure whether it’s enough.
The archaic Greeks recognized this tension without trying to resolve it. They understood that selfhood is not a stable achievement but a state of exposure. To be a person is to risk embarrassment, rejection, and disappearance. The desire to command one’s life exists alongside the knowledge that control is fragile.
Belonging Is Not the Opposite of Individuality
Modern culture often frames individuality and belonging as enemies. You are either independent or conformist, authentic or socially constrained. The archaic poets didn’t think this way.
For them, the self only became legible within a group: a circle of companions, a political movement, a shared ritual. Drinking parties, weddings, ships’ crews—these weren’t just social settings, they were identity-forming structures. Togetherness wasn’t a dilution of the self; it was its condition of possibility.
This has uncomfortable implications for us.
Many of our current crises—loneliness, burnout, political polarization—stem from trying to sustain a strong sense of self without meaningful collective structures. We are asked to be emotionally self-sufficient while navigating systems that demand constant visibility and competition.
The archaic world suggests that this is unsustainable. A self without companionship becomes brittle. A self without shared purpose turns inward, anxious and defensive.
What “How to Be Me” Might Mean Now
The ancient question was never “Who am I, really?” in the modern therapeutic sense. It was closer to: How do I live as a self among others without losing myself—or them?
That question feels newly urgent.
To be a self today may mean resisting the fantasy of total autonomy. It may mean accepting that identity is shaped by context, relationship, and responsibility. It may mean allowing contradiction: being ambitious and dependent, expressive and accountable, vulnerable and strong.
The archaic poets don’t offer a solution. They offer recognition.
They remind us that the struggle to matter without dominating, to belong without disappearing, is not a personal failure—it’s a human condition. The self has always lived in tension with the world around it. The task is not to escape that tension, but to learn how to stay inside it without breaking.
In that sense, “how to be me” is not a question to be answered once, alone. It is a practice—worked out in conversation, conflict, friendship, and shared risk. Just as it was, long ago, in rooms full of voices, wine, and song.
Reference:
Nicolson, Adam. How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Myth and Thought among the Greeks.
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. The Origins of Greek Thought.
Cornell University Press, 1982.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.
Harvard University Press, 1989.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Anchor Books, 1959.
