Identity and Ownership

A person’s identity is related to everything that happened in a person’s life. A person’s life is full of ownership, personal experiences, love, lost, and many other categories. Plato claims that the act of owning something is detrimental to one’s character; however, I strongly disagree. Owning something can help a person move forward in life or hold them back, but it still contributes to the resume of actions that makes a person who they are. Ownership is an important factor to one’s life, whether the subject is tangible or not, it helps define a person.

            The term “own it” is such an abstract phrase to say to a person. Own what? What is this “it”? This “it” is the intangible object. However, if you think about the phrase, that “it” is the situation at hand. The famous example of the model who’s about to walk down the runway, and someone says to them, “own it.” That person means to own the runway, own the clothes that their wearing, own yourself. You know who you are, so exude that confidence because at that moment, you’re rocking it. All of sudden, owning this “it” just contributed to that person’s resume of becoming who they are, that person received confidence, and now that experience of owning it will be with them forever. Now they can draw from that feeling of confidence whenever they see fit because they decided to “own it.”

            However, owning something isn’t always as pleasant, but it contributes to the person’s identity when everything is all said and done. Saleem Sinai owned this nose that ran his life. With his nose he was able to smell literally everything, such as emotions. While he was in the military, he was used to track someone down. He led him and his comrades into the deep part of the jungle that caused them to go insane. At the time he was suffering from amnesia, but after he got bit by a snake he leaves the jungle literally knowing who he was and his past. At the time he owned something that was detrimental to him and his comrades, but that nose led him to his identity. It not only led him to his literal identity, but it also led him to knowing that he’s a survivor. He may not be this great influential figure in India like he thought he was going to be, but he ended up being a person who went through many detrimental experiences, and eventually was able to conquer it. By the end of the book he was still living, he had a roof over his head, and he still had people who loved him. He was a survivor.

            Owning something, whether tangible or intangible, whether it’s detrimental or helpful, contributes to the resume of a person’s life; all the things that makes them who they are. Plato, Aristotle, and Jean-Paul Sartre were kind of on track with the relationship between ownership and identity. However, the relationship is more abstract than their ideas because the act of ownership intertwines with personal experiences, love, and lost, which are also contributing factors to identity.