I had a similar epiphany a few years ago when I realized I didn’t exist at all! My name, the one I was given at birth and the one you see here, framed a “person” who had characteristics both learned and force-fed by parents and society. I was honest, I believed in “God”, I followed the Ten Commandments, I only spoke when spoken to, I didn’t piss in my pants, and so on.

But the plain truth is I am a live human body. Period, full stop. As of this writing, anyway. I’m about to go take a shower, and I could slip and fall and crack my head open and bleed to death or whatever. None of us is owed a future, but at this moment “I” am alive, a live human.

All the rest … all those characteristics, all those opinions, all those beliefs, all those mental pathways for processing data are fictions the body created as a way of coping with the torrent of data it was being fed by the five senses. As an analogy, bodies are hardware, “persons” are operating systems, and traits, ideas, beliefs, opinions, habits, etc. are apps.

The hardware that underpins us has evolved an architecture that leads to survival … such as striving against hunger and cold and fatigue, seeking sex and shitting and pissing to feel relief. At the next level, fear and love and tribalism are also effective against external threats.

Taken together, these and other what we call “instincts” tilt us in certain directions as we develop our operating systems, but it’s useful to keep in mind that our operating systems are, in actual fact, no more real than Windows or MacOs or Linux. When you shut down the hardware, the OS disappears completely.

Names are just another layer on top of this. Your parents gave you a name, mine gave me a name, and we’ve spent our lives trying to be who we thought that name was. But you’re free to change your name, just as you’re free to be a different person … because it’s all made up!

Or, to use a slightly different metaphor, you’re free to resign from your body.

I did this several years ago; it was extremely liberating. “I” left the building, leaving the body to take care of itself, which, it turns out, it is fully capable of doing. It immediately seized all the attributes “I” left behind in order to continue functioning, but since it had no vested interest in maintaining any of them, it was free to take whatever directions it found to be better suited to its natural way of operating.

The body continues to maintain the name “Paul Davis” for convenience, but that person is, in fact, long gone. The body will now go take a shower and, with any luck, will not fall and die and will continue to be amused and amazed by what life brings.