The Identity Tax

I’d spent most of my teenage years building a career in programming, only to realize I’d barely built a life outside it.

So when I moved to Portugal at the age of 20, I took a break from work and threw myself into everything I’d missed. Boxing, lifting weights, meeting people, dating, making friends.

And I fucking loved it.

There was just one problem.

I had absolutely no idea how to introduce myself to people without feeling like a fucking alien.

Most people my age had spent the last few years going to university, making friends, dating, partying, and figuring themselves out.

I’d spent mine working.

Someone would ask what I did, and I’d tell them. Then came the follow-up questions. How long had I been working? How did I get into programming? How was I already doing all this at my age?

Before I knew it, what should’ve been a casual introduction had turned into an explanation of my entire life.

And I hated it. Not because I was ashamed of what I’d done. I was proud of it.

But I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. I was trying to make friends.

People don’t connect through resumes. They connect through simple things they have in common. The stupid things they did in school. The people they dated. The mistakes they made. All those ordinary things I’d barely made time for.

I could talk about programming for hours. I could explain how I’d built a career, worked with companies overseas, and become financially independent. But none of that helped when I was sitting across from someone and just wanted to feel like we belonged in the same conversation.

The strangest part was that I wasn’t particularly shy. I liked meeting people, joking around, and having a genuinely great time. But whenever my background entered the conversation, I started feeling like I had an identity to live up to. The ambitious engineer. The disciplined guy. The founder who had everything figured out.

And suddenly, I wasn’t just hanging out anymore. I was watching myself hang out.

Which made what happened next so ridiculous. The less people knew about my actual life, the more comfortable I became being myself.

And it all started in Aveiro.

When lying made me feel more authentic

When I first moved to Aveiro, Portugal, I did something I’m not particularly proud of. I lied about parts of my identity.

I told people I was American, that I was a student, and that I was just trying to figure out what to do with my life. Which, to be fair, wasn’t entirely a lie. I genuinely had no fucking idea what I wanted to do with my life anymore. I’d spent most of my teenage years building a career, and now I wanted to figure out who I was outside of it.

So I simplified everything. No career. No startups. No explaining how I’d been working since I was 15.

Just another clueless 20-year-old trying to figure things out.

And holy shit, it was liberating. I could meet someone without immediately becoming the engineer, the founder, or the guy who’d somehow skipped a decade of the usual life milestones.

I was just some dude.

And I was having an amazing time. I was spontaneous, goofy, and completely comfortable making an idiot of myself. I wasn’t thinking about whether people found me impressive. I wasn’t trying to live up to the person they’d heard about five minutes earlier. I could just exist.

The funny thing is, none of that personality was fake. The jokes, the stupidity, the curiosity, the friendships, the fun. That was all me.

The personality was real. The backstory wasn’t entirely.

I knew lying wasn’t a particularly healthy way to make friends. But the experience revealed something I hadn’t understood about myself. I wasn’t trying to become someone else. I was trying to find out who I was when my career stopped being the first thing people knew about me.

And for the first time in years, I was actually enjoying the process.

When being honest made everything worse

Later, when I moved to Lisbon, I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore. No more simplifying things. No more hiding parts of my life. I wanted people to know the real me.

So I started being completely open about everything: my work, ambitions, discipline, training, past struggles, and the things I’d sacrificed to get where I was.

And somehow, I ended up feeling more trapped than before.

People started introducing me as the founder, the boxer, or the ridiculously disciplined guy. None of those descriptions were necessarily wrong, but I started feeling like I had to live up to them. I became more conscious of what I said, how I behaved, and whether I was being consistent with the person people thought I was.

The more people knew about me, the less comfortable I felt being stupid around them. I’d accidentally turned my identity into something I had to maintain.

The cost of being impressive

One experience made this particularly obvious. I lived with someone who repeatedly told me she was afraid I’d judge her. Sometimes jokingly. Sometimes seriously.

She’d say things like:

“You’re going to judge me.”

Or:

“I don’t want you to see me like that.”

I found it confusing because I wasn’t consciously judging her. One night, after she’d had far too much to drink, I helped take care of her.

Even while she was extremely drunk, she was still worried about what I’d think of her. That genuinely shocked me. Of all the things she could’ve been thinking about in that moment, she was worried about being judged by me.

I can’t know exactly what was going through her mind, but it made me wonder whether people assumed I judged them by the same high standards I held myself to. Even though I never did.

I know nobody’s perfect, and I don’t expect them to be. I wanted to get to know people as they were, not just the good parts they felt they needed to show me to make up for some imagined gap between us.

Maybe I’d been taking myself so seriously that people felt they had to do the same around me. I needed to let my guard down, be goofy, and stop making everything feel so serious.

I wanted people to feel comfortable being themselves around me. And I wanted that same freedom.

You don’t owe everyone your entire story

I think we misunderstand what it means to be authentic. We’re constantly told to be ourselves, be honest, and never hide who we are. Which sounds great.

But does being yourself really mean explaining your entire identity to everyone you meet? Your achievements, struggles, ambitions, routines, insecurities, and everything you’ve been through?

I don’t think so. There’s a difference between being honest and feeling obligated to disclose so much.

You can be ambitious without talking about your ambitions. You can be disciplined without making discipline your personality. You can have a complicated past without explaining it to someone you’ve known for two months.

I’ve met people who seemed completely unserious at first. They’d say the dumbest things, make fun of themselves, and laugh at absolutely everything. Then I’d get to know them and discover they were incredibly intelligent, accomplished, and disciplined. They just didn’t feel the need to demonstrate it, and that’s what made them so easy to be around.

So there’s a question I’ve started asking myself before sharing something about my life:

Am I sharing this because I want to connect with someone, or because I feel like I need them to understand who I am?

Not every conversation needs to establish who I am, what I’ve accomplished, or where I’m going. Sometimes I just want to make someone laugh. Sometimes I want to hear about their life. Sometimes I want to say something completely ridiculous without worrying whether it fits the image they have of me.

I don’t need to be the founder, the engineer, or the disciplined guy in every room. I can just be some dude having a good time. That doesn’t make my ambitions any less real. It just means they don’t need to be the center of every interaction.

I’m also learning that this doesn’t require abandoning old friendships or avoiding people who’ve already seen my serious side. If I want people to see a different side of me, I can simply start showing it. No elaborate explanation necessary.

The identity tax

I had escaped the pressure of constantly achieving things, only to replace it with the pressure of being seen as someone who achieved things.

Which is pretty fucking stupid when you think about it. I didn’t take a break from programming to spend my evenings managing my personal brand. I took a break because I wanted to live a little.

That’s the identity tax. The more attached you become to how people perceive you, the more effort you spend maintaining that image, and the less freedom you have to behave naturally.

I don’t regret being ambitious or disciplined. But those are things I do, not everything I am.

I can take my life seriously without taking myself so seriously.