No One Knows You. Let That Set You Free

Jun 03, 2025

The woman at the grocery store thinks I'm polite. My neighbor assumes I'm a morning person because that's when I drag my recycling to the curb. My mother remembers me as the child who couldn't sit still during dinner.

None of them knows me.

Not really.

We move through the world as collections of fragments, leaving different pieces of ourselves in different places. The version your coworkers see bears little resemblance to the one your oldest friends know. The self you present to strangers on the bus has almost nothing in common with who you are at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling.

It's just how being human works.

The ancient Daoists understood this better than we do. While Western philosophy has spent centuries trying to pin down the "true self" – that authentic core we're all supposedly hiding or seeking – Daoism took a different approach. The Dao De Jing doesn't tell you to "find yourself." It suggests something more radical: maybe there's no fixed self to find.

"The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name."

Those famous opening lines are not just about the ineffability of cosmic truth. They're about the limits of definition itself. The moment you try to capture something in words, you've already missed it. This applies to rivers, mountains, empires – and especially to people.

You are not a thing that can be fully known or named.

This should terrify us. Instead, it might be the most liberating truth we ever encounter.

The prison of being known completely would be unbearable. Imagine if everyone – your boss, your ex, the barista who makes your coffee – could see the entirety of who you are. Every contradictory thought, every shameful desire, every private grief and joy. We'd never leave the house.

The Zhuangzi, the other pillar of Daoist thought, tells the story of a butcher named Cook Ding who carves ox carcasses with such skill that his knife never dulls. When asked how he does it, he explains that he no longer sees the ox as a solid object but as a constantly changing process with spaces between its parts. He simply moves his blade through those spaces.

"What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill," he says.

This butcher is not just cutting meat. He's demonstrating how to move through life, finding the spaces between fixed definitions, flowing around obstacles rather than crashing into them.

The spaces between who people think you are? That's where freedom lives.

The modern world doesn't much care for this idea. We are told to "build our personal brand" and "craft our narrative." Dating apps require us to summarize our essence in three witty sentences. Job interviews ask us to explain our five-year plan as if the future were something we could map rather than a territory that doesn't exist yet.

We are encouraged to become known quantities, predictable units in the marketplace of personality.

The Daoists would find this hilarious.

Lao Tzu reportedly left civilization riding a water buffalo, heading for the mountains. When pressed to write down his wisdom before disappearing, he reluctantly produced the Dao De Jing, then vanished from history. No personal brand. No LinkedIn profile. No five-year plan – just the freedom of being fundamentally unknowable.

Even quantum physics tells us that particles exist in states of probability until observed. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that we cannot simultaneously know both the position and momentum of a subatomic particle with perfect accuracy. The very act of measurement changes what's being measured.

You, too, are changed by being observed. You become something slightly different depending on who's looking.

The Greeks had their own version of this insight. "Know thyself," commanded the Oracle at Delphi. But Socrates, when confronted with this imperative, concluded that the only thing he knew for certain was that he knew nothing at all. Self-knowledge turned out to be an acknowledgment of unknowability.

But wait, this is not any excuse for bad behavior. "No one really knows me" isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for treating people poorly. The Dao De Jing is clear about the importance of compassion, restraint, and what we might now call ethical conduct.

But it does mean we can stop the exhausting work of maintaining a consistent identity across all contexts.

I have played the part too. And that time, I spent almost an entire year trying to be the person a particular job wanted me to be. I typed emails in a voice that wasn't mine. I adopted opinions that seemed to fit the culture. I dressed for the role, spoke for the role, and thought for the role. By the end, I was so tired I could barely remember who I had been before.

The Daoists would call this swimming against the current. They'd recommend wu-wei instead – non-action, or perhaps more accurately, effortless action. Not forcing yourself into shapes that don't fit you. Not struggling to be known in ways that constrain rather than liberate.

"The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid," says the Dao De Jing. "Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice."

We fear that without a fixed identity, we'll dissolve into nothing. The opposite is true. When you stop trying to maintain a consistent self across all situations, you discover something more fluid and alive than any single definition could capture.

Water has no constant shape, yet it carves canyons through mountains.

This is not just philosophical wordplay. There are practical benefits to embracing your fundamental unknowability:

You'll worry less about what others think. Their perceptions are incomplete by definition.

You'll recover faster from rejection. Someone who rejects you is rejecting a fragment, not the whole.

You'll become more adaptable. Without clinging to a fixed self-concept, you can respond to changing circumstances without an identity crisis.

You'll judge others less harshly. Because recognizing your own multiplicity makes it easier to accept contradictions in others.

Of course, there are limits to this approach. Complete shapelessness is not the goal either. The Dao isn't about the absence of form but about finding the right relationship between form and formlessness. The empty space inside a cup makes it useful, but you still need the cup.

Some consistency matters. Some commitments need keeping. Some promises shouldn't be broken just because you're "a different person now." The trick is distinguishing between necessary structures and unnecessary constraints.

Alan Watts, the great Western interpreter of Eastern thought, put it this way: "You're under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago." He wasn't advocating chaos or selfishness, but rather a lighter touch on the steering wheel of identity.

The next time someone misunderstands you completely, try something counterintuitive: thank them. They've just reminded you of your vastness, your uncontainable nature, your fundamental freedom from being fully known.

The next time you feel trapped by others' expectations, remember the Daoist sage who "acts without doing, teaches without saying, allows all things to arise without making them happen." You don't have to perform for an audience. You can simply be, in all your contradictory glory.

No one knows you completely. Not your parents, not your partner, not your closest friend. Not even you know yourself entirely…the unconscious mind remains largely mysterious, our motivations often hidden from ourselves.

You are not a puzzle to be solved or a riddle to be answered. You're more like the Dao itself – "something formlessly fashioned, that existed before heaven and earth." You're a process, not a product. A question, not an answer.

Let that set you free.

The Daoists would say freedom was already your natural state. You just forgot somewhere along the way, as we all do. No one knows you. Thank goodness for that.