The Limits of Knowing Yourself
Socrates, Blade Runner 2049, and the danger of trying to fully understand who you are.
Deep Life Reflections | Essay 116 | James Gibb
We’re told to know ourselves, to define who we are with clarity and precision. But not everything about us needs to be understood.
Writing in The Atlantic, You Don’t Know Yourself as Well as You Think You Do, Julie Beck observes how much of modern life seems to be pushing us to know and examine ourselves in ever greater detail: therapy, personality tests, tracking our steps, our sleep, our moods. Journaling. The idea that if you’re not actively working to understand yourself, you’re falling behind.
She quotes Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Yet Beck’s central argument is that we don’t know ourselves as well as we think—and that we don’t need to. In fact, letting go of the need to fully know ourselves might lead to a little more peace, flexibility, and even integrity in our lives.
Would Socrates agree?
I think he might.
Because the starting point of Socrates’ philosophy is humility.
“One thing only I know, and that is I know nothing.”
For him, real understanding begins when we start to doubt our most cherished beliefs and dogmas. When we turn inwards.
Which leads us to the phrase most associated with him: “Know thyself.”
Socrates didn’t mean we should reach perfect self-understanding, only that we should never stop examining. To “know thyself” was, for him, an ongoing act of humility.
Socrates believed the worthiest subject for any philosopher wasn’t the stars or trees, but our minds, and what we might become. He wandered Athens asking difficult questions about the human soul, uncovering assumptions, and exposing certainties. Reflecting not lecturing.
In doing so, it led him to offer a definitive answer to one of life’s oldest and hardest questions: What is the meaning of virtue? For Socrates, it wasn’t obedience or status or strength. It was wisdom. The ability to know what is good. And the courage to live by it.
And that was his legacy.
Condemned by the Athenian state, Socrates refused to beg for mercy, despite his sentence of death by poisoning. Even when his friends bribed the prison guards and offered him an easy escape, he stood firm. To him, fleeing would betray the principles he had spent his life defending: the importance of reason, integrity, and dialogue, even in the face of injustice. His parting words were calm:
“Be of good cheer, and say that you are burying my body only.”
Perhaps the lesson from Socrates is that the pursuit of self-knowledge should be tempered with humility, openness to change (recognising that we often underestimate how much we will change), and a willingness to let some parts of ourselves remain unknowable.
Not everything needs to be tracked, categorised, or defined. Being human often means being inconsistent, irrational, and unclear.
Some truths may only ever emerge in the living, not the knowing.
Three thousand years later, Socrates, I think, would agree.
Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Directed by Denis Villeneuve
In Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, there’s a more disturbing question: what happens when something else claims to know us better than we do?
Villeneuve is one of my favourite directors working today. The Canadian filmmaker, who has spoken of his love of stillness and silence in the creative process, brings a precise aesthetic and deep emotional imprint to every film he touches. He respects his audience’s intelligence and isn’t afraid of ambiguity or unresolved questions.
These are my types of filmmakers.
In 2017, Villeneuve directed the follow-up to Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner. Unlike so many modern sequels and reboots, he didn’t just remix familiar themes or characters to deliver nostalgic fan service. Instead, he built on the philosophical questions raised by the original, crafting a slow-burning, contemplative sci-fi film that investigates nothing less than what it means to be human.
Set thirty years after the original, Blade Runner 2049 takes us back to Los Angeles and a future where bioengineered humans—known as replicants—are designed to serve real humans. In Scott’s original, the replicants were rebellious and short-lived, hunted down by blade runners like Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). By 2049, a new generation of obedient replicants has emerged. More sophisticated. More controlled.
Officer K (Ryan Gosling) is one of these newer models. K is designed to comply, to obey, and to track down and ‘retire’ older rogue replicants who have lived long beyond their lifespan. But when K tracks down a replicant just trying to live a peaceful life as a farmer, he uncovers a long-buried secret—a replicant who may have given birth—that could challenge the entire societal order. This pulls him into a mystery about his own past, the power of memory, identity, and the possibility that he might be more than what he was designed to be.
True to Villeneuve’s sensibility, there are no easy answers.
In mathematics and physics, K often represents a constant, something fixed, known, dependable. But in Blade Runner 2049, K is anything but fixed. He’s searching and uncertain. Not unlike Josef K from Kafka’s The Trial, a man lost in a dehumanising system he can’t understand.
Blade Runner 2049 looks incredible. Villeneuve reunites with his long-time collaborator Roger Deakins, whose cinematography is astonishing. He creates a pulsating, fragile world of crashing waves, falling snow, vast, empty spaces and torrential, bleak rain. The film retains its cyberpunk roots and strong Asian cityscape fusion. When K travels to a long-abandoned Las Vegas, the visuals shift into an apocalyptic, dust-filled yellow haze. The film is more expansive than the original.
The film’s run-time is close to three hours and long stretches demand patience and attention. But the reward is there for those willing to go the distance.
Audiences weren’t. The film underperformed at the box-office; its length and slow pacing cited as key reasons. Reflecting later, Villeneuve said that while still proud of the film, he realised he’d made “the most expensive art house movie in cinema history.”
He may be right. It’s not a film for everyone. But it’s a deep, rich, intelligent film that asks important questions. Questions that are even more urgent in 2025 than in 2017, especially around artificial intelligence, consciousness, and what defines a human being.
As one critic wrote, “Blade Runner 2049 isn’t about what happens; it’s about what this terrifying and beautiful world tells us about life and perception and reality.”
The film offers at least one answer to the question of what it means to be human: the capacity for free thought. Because to ask that very question, to wonder who you are, you must first be free to think for yourself.
The alternative is a world that tells you who you are. Or worse, what you are.
There’s pressure today to define who and what you are with crisp certainty. AI is becoming an enabler of that. We can ask it to give us therapy, analyse our behaviour, process our journals. We can throw all our data, all our thoughts and desires into the machine and say, “Tell me who I am.”
And it will. Often scarily accurately.
But even before we consider the risk of surrendering all this private and personal information to tech companies—many operating more from profit than from any desire to further human understanding—there is a deeper contemplation. That the parts of ourselves we don’t fully understand are not flaws or faulty circuits to be fixed or upgraded.
In fact, they may be the very thing that keeps us undeniably human.
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