Eventual Identities

Post-modern western civilization as a whole, as every single player defining it by operating into its borders, seems to be definitely affected by a permanent search for identity. Who am I? Assertive answers to such question seem not to be anymore able to outlive small cycles, eventually lasting a couple of hours. “I am an accountant” was the typical, assertive stance XXth century accountants where very likely used to offer when it came to define their own identity and role in social interaction. Any other definition basically sounded as a lie. Such affirmative stance sounds now very naïve, not to mention partial, as soon as individual identity looks like an operator surfing through categories expressed by a tag cloud. Being an accountant, a bass guitar player and a decent thai cook, the very same guy is actually able to milk the money he relies on for a living in a completely different from, say, a colleague accountant being even into, say, sailing and ironing. Plastic identities seem to require plastic shifting from one activity to another, not to mention combining many of them into the same framework. As far as amateurial talents and professional skills merge into complex systems, eventualism emerge as a new positioning strategy.