PLEASE TELL ME WHO I AM

I

In 1979 the progressive rock group Supertramp released The Logical Song, an instant classic that catapulted them to superstardom. It began:

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh, it was beautiful, magical

Laced with cynicism, it continued:

But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, oh, responsible, practical.

Then the chorus rose with its desperate plea:

Please tell me who I am.

To me, this captures the abiding existential crisis of modern times. To meet the demands of material prosperity, we train ourselves to become responsible, practical, and logical above all else. In doing so, we risk losing our connection to wonder, mystery, and something larger than ourselves. So who are we, really—bureaucratic performers managing our lives like projects, or artists of experience, channeling the fullness and possibility of being alive?

More recently, British psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist makes the same point in his seminalThe Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things. ¹ He argues that we have allowed the artist, adventurer, and spirit within us to take a back seat to the bureaucrat and performer, with tragic consequences for our well-being. He does not pull his punches:

We would appear to be engaged in committing suicide, intellectual and moral—if not indeed literal… resulting in a version of the world that is grossly impoverished and lacking in meaning. One more fit for a computer than a human being.

In the age of AI, McGilchrist’s words feel even more prescient. Are we, like AI, efficiency machines optimized to function and perform, or are we spiritual beings capable of living from a richness and depth that lies beyond mere performance?

II

What does any of this have to do with Buddhism?

To explain this, let’s start by imagining a chart with two columns.

The left column is titled: How the world appears to me without reflection.

The right column is titled: Could it be otherwise? (or more playfully, Is that so?)

We can fill the left column with elements of life as they ordinarily appear to us. In my case, I might note that I am a British-born lawyer and business executive named Lawrence. I live on a planet in a physical universe. I interact with friends and family in a modern culture with familiar rhythms. I will live for a certain span of years and then die. This is life as it appears ordinarily, without much examination.

The aim of Buddhism is to fill in the second column. It invites us to ask whether there is another perspective on those ordinary assumptions—one that might reveal more about who we are and how we experience the world.

To make this concrete, here is a mundane example.

I am known for helping build Pixar into a beloved entertainment brand. Ask me what I really think about Pixar—or Apple, Google, Tesla, OpenAI, or any other tech giant. Do I believe these companies were created by rare geniuses who peered into the future and single-handedly advanced technology?

No. That is the left column view. It is how things look on the surface.

What might a right column view look like?

I do believe these companies changed technology in remarkable ways, but not because a few exceptional individuals conjured the ideas out of thin air. Innovation emerges from decades, sometimes generations, of experimentation, trial and error, failure, and preparation—most of which is invisible. When a Pixar or an Apple finally breaks through, we see only the tip of an iceberg and assume it is the whole story.

For Pixar to make the first computer-animated feature film, three generations of tinkerers had to solve countless problems: how to create believable images on film, how to make those films with drawn images, how to render color faithfully, how to design software capable of animating and drawing those images, how to scale systems to handle the immense computational load, and how to record those images onto film, to name a few. Seventy-five years of recognized and unrecognized effort created the conditions for a small group of talented artists and programmers to push the tip of the computer animation iceberg above the surface. We call that tip “Pixar.”

That is the right column view.

Many contemporary thinkers echo this perspective. Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that success is circumstantial. In his book Determined, he writes, “We are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control.”³

And yes, in case you are curious, Sapolsky says the same about failure: “We already know enough to understand that the endless people whose lives are less fortunate than ours don’t implicitly ‘deserve’ to be invisible.⁴

Another right column view.

Robert Heinlein, one of the luminaries of modern science fiction, put it even more succinctly in his delightful novel The Door Into Summer:

When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.⁵

A poetic right column truth: things unfold only when the conditions are ripe.

It might be surprising to hear that these examples, from McGilchrist to Pixar to Sapolsky and Heinlein, are decidedly Buddhist in nature because they each deconstruct reality as it ordinarily appears to seek a deeper, more complete, and expansive perspective—the right column view.

Buddhism, at its core, is the integration into one’s life of the right column. It asks us to examine the ordinary, surface-level assumptions we hold about reality and to determine whether there are deeper explanations. It begins with the insight that ordinary appearance—the left column—is not the whole story. In fact, it may be the very thing that holds us back.

The grand master of this line of thinking is Buddhism’s greatest philosopher, Nāgārjuna. All roads of Buddhist philosophy lead back 2,000 years to him, and in particular, his epic work, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way⁶.

We will unpack the details of the Middle Way philosophy in later pieces. For now, I want to focus on one stanza, certainly among the most famous words in all Buddhist history: there is no difference between samsara (the world of suffering) and nirvana (freedom from suffering).

What seems like a paradox—how can suffering be the same as freedom from suffering?—turns out to be a deep commentary on the nature of reality. Nāgārjuna is saying that suffering and freedom from suffering are not different places we go to: they are different perspectives on where we are. What are those perspectives? You may have guessed it: The left column and the right column.

Buddhism calls left column thinking “eternalistic,” meaning that we take the world as it appears to us as real— we make it eternal. It describes the right column as “vast and profound,” meaning that reality is far more vast and profound than appearance suggests.

Traditional presentations of Buddhism often begin with themes such as death and impermanence, mindfulness, suffering, renunciation, or compassion. All these are important, but I believe the doorway that opens most readily for modern minds is the one Nāgārjuna described: the openness to the possibility that, no matter how convinced we are of how things appear, there is always a more expansive view.

To me, the search for that expansive view is the very meaning of awakening . If the Buddha stands for anything at all, it is that.

This does not make Buddhism a panacea or a quick fix. It is not a balm that soothes all our problems. Applied properly, however, I think it is something far more valuable: a way of opening the mind to possibilities we had not imagined—and, in doing so, gradually transforming how we experience our lives.

What might that transformation look like? It can take many forms, but often it encompasses a new kind of ease—one that comes from sensing the larger picture we are part of.

It is the kind of ease that can shrug off many of the annoyances, distractions, and petty concerns of day-to-day life; that finds genuine pleasure in simple things—making a cup of tea for a friend, washing dishes, reading a book; and that makes us less captive to emotional swings and more steady and grounded. It is an ease that no longer craves victory and proving ourselves at every turn; that is freer to express what naturally flows through us; that recognizes we all struggle despite our best efforts to hide it; and that foments the warmth of friendship, the joy of a kindness, and the grace of decline.

In Buddhist thinking, the first step toward these kind of shifts is simply to remain open to these two perspectives: the ordinary appearance of the left column, and the more expansive possibilities revealed by the right. All of Buddhist philosophy, meditation, ritual, and imagery are ultimately in service of this aim.

III

These distinctions between logic and wonder (Supertramp), bureaucrat and artist (McGilchrist), suffering and freedom (Nāgārjuna), and left column and right column, are not idle speculation or mystical musing. They go to the heart of our biggest modern-day crisis, unfolding before us in real time.

The technological advances of the past generation are having a profound impact on human experience, now accelerated by AI. Little by little, we are relinquishing independent, critical assessment of life and reality to algorithmic and machine-learning systems whose outputs we readily accept as truth.

This acceptance of technology-enabled information takes left-column thinking—believing what appears to us—to an extreme. We are befriending our AI programs and deferring to algorithms that decide what we will unwittingly see and hear. My goal is not to romanticize a pre-digital age—I’ve spent a career in the tech world of Silicon Valley—but I have come to realize that, for all the progress we gain, in terms of our humanity, the stakes have grown dangerously high.

We are at risk of a future in which it will be hard to see our way out of an endlessly refracted digital maze, a hall of mirrors where reflections multiply and the exit is hidden. I don’t think this is inevitable, but we have many examples in which the media hijacks the mind to serve purposes not conducive to our well-being.

In the 1950s, the media convinced an entire generation that smoking was glamorous, healthy, and even doctor-recommended. In the 1970s, media campaigns persuaded us that processed foods and soda pop were essential conveniences of modern living. Epidemics of lung cancer, heart disease, and obesity followed. In the 2000’s the assault is happening not to what we consume but to what we think, putting our mental well-being at stake. The results, so far, are not good.

We can find our way through this, but only by remembering that what appears is not the whole story. Whether we call it Buddhism, the two columns, or McGilchrist’s master and emissary, the alternative way of seeing they describe is a means to ensure that we maintain our integrity and humanity and that our technology-enhanced future serves us, not the other way around.

What Buddhist thought ultimately offers us is hope. It is a rare tradition that, at its core, teaches us to question and transcend the narratives that trap us. Its magic is to help us see clearly. Some of Buddhism greatest masters described this as a “rare opportunity,” urging us to take advantage of it.

To open that door, we don’t have to twist ourselves into lotus postures, prostrate to statues, or renounce the things we enjoy. We have to open our minds and, with humility and sincerity, bear witness to our unexamined assumptions and allow something new to emerge.

Supertramp’s plaintive cry, “Please tell me who I am,” is not just a lyric. It asks us to choose. Am I trapped inside the barrel of a technology-enabled wave that shapes how I think and perceive, or am I free, able to ride that wave without being defined by it? The Buddha and Nāgārjuna asked this same question long ago. Our circumstances differ from theirs, but their answer remains instructive—and perhaps more urgent than ever as we hurtle toward an uncertain future.

Afternote: Something to Ponder

To bring these ideas to life, perhaps give this a try: Pick something you take for granted—maybe a recent success or failure, or a story you tell yourself about who you are.

Ask yourself: What's the left-column view? How does this appear to you in ordinary experience, without thinking about it?

Then ask: Is that so? Could there be another view, another interpretation or explanation that might change or shed light on that view? What happens when you try to deconstruct it?

There are no wrong answers. Just notice if anything comes up.

Add end material and formatted footnotes

1. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021).
2. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, 1314–15
3. Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (New York: Penguin Press, 2023), 240.
4. Sapolsky, Determined, 403
5. Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957).
6. Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, translated by Jay L. Garfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)

For example, the right column perspective reveals that the self is not the rigid and fixed entity it seems, that our emotional patterns don’t have to be our destiny, that the stories we tell ourselves about life and the world are not carved into stone, and that the culture of performance and materialism is not the final word on meaning.

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