The Cost of Identity

The Cost of Identity

I was listening to a talk the other day, and someone mentioned a man in his seventies whose five-year contract was about to end. The numbers were absurd. Around $120 million a year. The tone of the discussion was sombre. There was talk of grief, of being “cut”, of no longer being wanted.

My first reaction was blunt disbelief.

Who needs that kind of money?

How could losing a contract at that stage of life feel like anything other than a mild adjustment?

And then I realised what I was missing.

This wasn’t grief about livelihood.

It was grief about identity.

That distinction changed everything.

For most of my life, when I feared loss, it was the fear of livelihood. Of not being able to support myself. Of instability. Of survival. That fear is real, embodied, and sane. When livelihood is threatened, the nervous system responds because safety is genuinely at risk.

What I was witnessing in that conversation was something else entirely.

The grief wasn’t about how to live. It was about who to be.

Once that penny dropped, a lot of things snapped into focus: why people keep chasing more long after their needs are met, and why they tolerate conditions that hollow them out, why values become negotiable, why the world feels so loud, so frantic, so ungrounded.

We are not living in an economy organised around livelihood.

We are living in a culture organised around identity maintenance.

When work becomes identity, losing relevance feels like annihilation. When income is no longer tied to survival but to status, money becomes symbolic rather than functional. It doesn’t represent safety. It represents visibility, worth, and continuity of self.

That kind of hunger is endless.

No amount of success stabilises identity, because identity is inherently external. It requires witnesses. It requires reinforcement. It needs to be seen to exist. And when that reinforcement is threatened, the system panics, regardless of how materially secure the person actually is.

This is not limited to media or celebrity culture. It shows up everywhere.

In corporate environments where people work themselves into illness long after they could afford to stop.

In spiritual spaces where enlightenment becomes a brand and awakening becomes content.

In activism, parenting, healing, and even self-development, where the role replaces the self.

Once identity is the organising principle, everything becomes extractive. Relationships. Bodies. Time. Integrity. The system must keep feeding itself, or it collapses.

That collapse is what we are witnessing collectively.

It is why everything feels urgent, why discourse has hardened into polarity, and why nuance disappears, why people double down instead of slowing down. Why noise is mistaken for impact.

Most people are not chasing comfort or sufficiency.

They are chasing legitimacy.

I recognise this because I lived it in another form.

My own chasing wasn’t about money or fame. It was about proving I was good enough. Worthy. Wanted. I was born into a context where belonging felt conditional, and that belief was reinforced over time. So I learned to earn my place by accommodating, overgiving, absorbing pressure, and tolerating misuse.

That pattern cost me deeply. In relationships. At work. In my body. In my sense of self.

When my marriage ended, and my career collapsed, what terrified me was my livelihood. I wasn’t worried about status. I was concerned about survival. About housing. About stability. About how to live in a world that was becoming increasingly erratic and algorithm-driven.

The losses were real. The fear was real.

But something else was happening underneath.

I was slowly losing the motivation to perform.

And when performance drops, many systems stop making sense.

I see this most clearly when I think about horses.

For years, I owned horses. I loved them deeply, not for competition, not for achievement, not for ribbons or rankings. I loved their physicality. Their smell. Grooming them, mixing feeds, picking out hooves, washing them, caring for their well-being, watching them graze, being near them, and riding without an agenda. I loved them without a mission or an outcome in mind.

But I was surrounded by pressure. Opinions. Expectations. Training protocols. Constant commentary about what I should be doing, how often, how correctly. Riding became something to justify rather than enjoy. Presence was replaced by performance. Connection was overridden by the need to appease opinions, to prove something, to satisfy coaches.

And frankly, I disliked the industry itself. I disliked the puppet masters behind it, and I disliked much of the culture surrounding it. Yet I stayed. I endured. I maintained face, even while knowing I was not aligned with it.

At the time, I lacked the confidence to stand up to a loud, dominant consensus. The voices were amplified, rewarded, and widely followed. I wasn’t ready to be contrary. So I complied, not because it was true for me, but because it felt safer than standing alone.

My sense of self was still organised around proving worth. Proving I was good enough to belong. Only later did the more honest question arise. Why did I want to belong to something I did not respect?

This is the trap many of us fall into. Agreement is rewarded. Dissent is met with scrutiny, gossip, dismissal, and quiet exclusion. The cost of standing apart is often social erasure.

And because humans are wired for connection, many of us choose belonging over alignment, even when the belonging is hollow.

Eventually, I froze. I lost my taste for it. My spirit dulled. My body lived in a state of agitation. My nervous system was constantly braced. I stopped going to the round yard. I stopped engaging in ways that felt natural to me. I withdrew.

When I eventually had to let the horses go due to financial reality after the divorce, the grief was enormous. Larger than I could have anticipated. I wasn’t only grieving their loss. I was grieving lost time. Lost love. The loss of my own truth, which I had not defended when they lived beside me.

What hurt most was the clarity that arrived too late. The realisation that I had allowed others to govern my relationship with something I loved because, at the time, belonging felt safer than alignment. I was trying to hold both, and in doing so, I lost myself in the process.

Then came another system of extraction where my voice again carried little weight. Divorce. Courts.

For years, I tortured and tormented myself for how weak and silly I was.

Recently, driving past a dressage competition, something shifted. For the first time, I felt relief. A clear, embodied relief.

I realised I never wanted that world. I never wanted competition. I never wanted to prove myself through performance. I wanted a relationship. Presence. Quiet connection.

I hadn’t failed to compete.

I had been trying to belong to a game that was never mine.

That same insight applies everywhere.

When identity drives behaviour, joy disappears. Curiosity disappears. Relationship collapses into outcome. And people become exhausted without knowing why.

What I feel now is not brokenness. It is not grief either, though there is an awareness of time passed, and my heart still longs for their presence, to smell them, to hear them, to be near them again.

What I feel is wholeness.

The earned wisdom of what I learned about them and about myself.

Integrated. Embodied. Settled.

I am no longer compelled to participate in systems that require self-betrayal to be legible. I’m not interested in noise, performance, or borrowed authority. I don’t feel the urge to be seen in the same way. Solitude feels natural, not defensive.

This isn’t withdrawal. It’s discrimination. The discernment to listen fully to myself, regardless of popular opinion.

From the outside, it may look like I’ve hardened. I know it isn’t that. It is intelligence refusing to sell itself out again. And even if I no longer belong, I now belong to myself.

Once you see the difference between livelihood and identity, a lot of chasing collapses on its own; the compulsion loses its charge. The volume drops.

You don’t become better.

You become clearer.

And clarity doesn’t need witnesses.

It simply lives.

Delahrose 🕯️🦉🤍