Myself

We are doomed to act our self out in the physical world at all times and especially when alone. Other people will readily project some existing meme onto you, which you are free to inhabit and interpret without adding any particular content of your own. It is easy to make this comfortable bargain, hard and risky to break out of it, although we all have selves distinct from this sociability, if we haven't denied, distorted, neglected, or forgotten them. The dining room is full of memes at tables of four. You watch yourself from the inside while maintaining a suitable outside, in company and by yourself, beside yourself. You project perhaps an idiosyncratic idea of the prototype but not an entirely separate existence. One other person can make you feel objective. It may be counterfactual, but solitude feels like being more authentically yourself, more "real," existing in time alone. That isn't the whole story though. With luck you are also othered, part of a larger reality, connected on the soul level with in a circle of love, if you have sensibly made yourself lovable and given others the love and attention we all need