The Overton window of personal identity

The Overton window is the range of political ideas that are acceptable in mainstream society at a given time. The window changes over time. Ideas like universal suffrage, gay marriage, and climate action have moved from the fringes of society to the manifestos of the major political parties, while cannibalism is (and will hopefully remain) completely unpalatable.

What is and what is not acceptable is shaped by millions of individual interactions. Some of these are deeply personal, like having a friend convince you, others happen en masse when a fringe idea is thrust into the limelight by media coverage. NATO membership, for example, had little public support in Sweden or Finland until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

I think that something similar exists for our identities. There is an Overton window of what it is to be me, filled with the possible selves that I could become. I can change the options available to me – I can resolve to be a different person, trying to alter the way I think and behave and define myself – and they can also change without me even realising.

Vote for who you want to be

Short of Damascene conversions and blows to the head, identity change is usually a pretty slow process. It takes time to internalise a new identity, reconciling it with your existing identity or intentionally discarding the old you.

Of course, that doesn’t stop me from engaging in new behaviours in the meantime, and indeed doing this is key to moving in the direction I want to go. The repeated behaviour starts to normalise the identity and create new habits.

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits (which I confess I have not read), says:

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity.

Sometimes things do not stick. The statistics on January gym memberships tell a familiar story. We resolve to be a different kind of person, we give it a go for a while, and then we relapse. I took up running for about six months in the hopes that the endorphin high that everyone goes on about would turn me into a person who likes running. It did not. Various other hobbies have ended the same way, indeed this very blog post is part of an attempt to become the kind of person who writes blog posts. We shall see if it is successful.

Failure is not necessarily a bad thing. Figuring out who one is and shaping who one wants to be is the essential struggle at the heart of the human condition. Failure, even frequent failure, is par for the course.

I think part of why we are so often unsuccessful is that we set ourselves a target identity that is so far outside of our Overton window that it gains no political traction within ourselves. We jump into the deep end by declaring that we will go to the gym every day even though we have never so much as seen a swimming pool before. As soon as the muscle ache sets in we discover that our New Year’s resolution had no backing from our internal voters, and the government that introduced it is soundly defeated by the Video Games on the Sofa party.

Choose identities that are within your Overton window and make the case for them

We will have much more luck with our New Year’s resolution if we set out to become a version of ourselves that is already within our Overton window, even if it is on the edges. When we are trying to change our identity, we are engaging in a political campaign to convince ourselves that that new identity is the right one to adopt. We need to be ready to do the hard slog of door-knocking and distributing leaflets, but we can make things easier by picking policies that are easy to sell.

So how does one convince oneself to change oneself? Well you might start by following some gymfluencers on Instagram, or by asking a friend who goes to the gym regularly to give you a pep talk. Some self-reflection on one’s motivations and ultimate goals is required. We tend to be very specific in defining who we want to be and what we want to achieve, but while SMART objectives are great for quarterly business plans, they are not so good for the messy business of being human.

YouTuber CGP Grey offers an alternative to specific New Year’s resolutions which I’ve found very useful. He suggests setting a broad theme like ‘health’ as a way of helping you focus on the thing you actually want (to be healthier) rather than a specific way of doing that (going the gym) that might not actually work for you. If when you’re faced with a decision (what shall I do this weekend?) you choose the healthier option (go for a walk rather than play video games) a bit more often then you are making progress. Through a lifetime of tiny decisions you change who you are. Each time you are, as Clear puts it, voting for the type of person you want to become. You are moving the Overton window of what it means to be you.

Be aware of external influences

Our identities can also be changed by outside forces, and I think that this happens vastly more often than it does through any intentionality on our own part. We are influenced by our friends, by acquaintances, by strangers. They might persuade us with words or merely set us an example through their actions. They might be explicit in what they are doing or blissfully unaware that we are observing them at all.

Oftentimes we are equally unaware that it is happening. We are every day bathed in the seafoam of a hundred ideas and arguments, all crashing against each other as they attempt to weather the jagged rocks of our society into something smoother and more perfect. We may think that we stand immune to these natural forces, but the castles of our identities whether built of sand or stone or protected by levees are also inexorably reshaped.

We are also influenced greatly by the media we consume. Ralph Waldo Emmerson is attributed as saying:

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Most of us can say the same, though we might replace or augment ‘books’ with TV programmes, films, tweets, blog posts and other modern forms of media. In many ways I am an amalgam of a huge multitude of people, real and fictional, that I have admired in some way. This YouTuber’s sense of style, that friend’s commitment to living ethically, this TV character’s courage in the face of adversity.

Though these are outside forces, you still have some control over them. You can choose what media you consume, who you spend time with, and which ideas you entertain. It’s easy to think of external influences as being entirely negative and steering you away from being the ‘true’ you, but is definitely not the case. In fact you can enlist those influences to your cause. Get the algorithms working in your favour, promoting content that will make you the person you want to be, and engage with people who embody the identity that you want to have. You’ll find it a lot easier to gather the votes you need.

There are also external influences we can do nothing about; sometimes our identities are shaped entirely by chance. When I was 15, I was part of a team from my school that submitted an entry into a national space settlement design competition. If we won, we would go on to compete in a live event. As it happened, we were unsuccessful. But then days before the event every newsreader’s worst nightmare happened, the unpronounceable volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland, bringing chaos to European air travel, and preventing the Northern Irish team from competing. The competition organisers picked our team to replace them, and we went on to not only win the national competition, but also the international one. Thus began my self-identification as someone who wanted a career in the space industry.

That same year we also competed in a mock trial competition. I enjoyed it a great deal, but our team did poorly, we didn’t get into the next round, and there were no volcanoes to save us. Becoming a lawyer remains outside my Overton window.

Nudge your Overton window a little at a time

The most significant identity shifts typically happen early on in life when there are a thousand possible paths to take. As we get older we start to make big choices that forever close off certain paths or at least make them much more difficult to traverse. If I decide now that I want a career in medicine, following that path will be dramatically more difficult than if I had decided at an early age that my goal was to become a doctor.

Our identities start to settle, if only because constantly them is exhausting. If I want to retain most of the life, and friends, and hobbies that I have now, then I must keep my identity within some bounds, within my Overton window. That doesn’t mean that as an old dog you cannot learn new tricks, just that you need to be reasonable about which tricks you can learn.

Each time that you nudge your Overton window in a new direction, you make it easier to nudge it a little further in that direction, and if you keep nudging then you can end up with a totally new identity. When you look back at who you were five, ten, twenty years ago you might be able to point to some watershed moments where you made big life decisions, but you’ll also discover that you have changed who you are without even realising it. The more aware you are of this, the more that you can make sure that that change to your Overton window takes you in the direction that you want to go.

J. Dudley