I Am What I Think You Think I Am

By Kachi Obata '28 | The Babcock Torch

"Got any hobbies?"

It's perhaps the most harmless question in the world, and you’ve answered it a hundred times without thinking. But watch what actually happens in the half-second before you speak. You're rarely ever retrieving a fact. You select one. You run a quick, silent calculation about who's asking, what they already seem to think of you, and which version of yourself will land cleanly in this particular conversation. Then you offer that one. It's true. It's also a fraction, and you chose the fraction.

Nobody teaches you to do this. Everybody does it.

Charles Cooley gave us the sharpest account of why. His idea was the looking-glass self, and it’s usually condensed into a line that goes something along the lines of: "I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am — I am what I think you think I am."

Now I want you to sit with that for a second, because it's stranger than it first appears. It doesn't say the self is private and interior, nor does it say the self is simply whatever society decides. It says the self is assembled out of reflections, and specifically out of your reading of those reflections. Not the mirror itself, but your interpretation of the mirror. An imagined image of an imagined image, held steady by repetition until it hardens into something you would call "me".

I've known this idea for years. I've even explained it to other people. And still, when I sat with it properly a few weeks ago, it unsettled me in a way it hadn't before. Because if the self really is made of reflections, then what happens to the parts of you that nobody is reflecting anymore?

There was once a version of me that was an athlete. Not casually. Golf, competitively. Swimming, professionally. Chess, competitively. Taekwondo, competitively. Even badminton. A diet so strict it organised the shape of my week, and a tight schedule beginning at 4am daily to go along with it. If you had asked that boy the hobbies question, he would not have needed the half-second. The answer was the whole architecture of his life, and everyone around him knew it, and he knew they knew it, and that circuit — his knowing that they knew — was the actual self. Not the little muscles he had. The circuit.

There was another version of me that was a cook. All I did was cook. I was in the kitchen constantly. Baking, testing things, buying random ingredients from the supermarket to see what they would do or recreating recipes I saw watching instagram reels. I fed everyone, all the time. I left secondary school as the best food and nutrition student. And — this is the detail I keep returning to — I had chef jackets made. Not bought. Made. I had head coverings. I wore them to cook, in my own kitchen, for people who already knew who I was.

You can’t say that’s a hobby. A hobby most certainly doesn't require a costume. That was a whole version of me, with a wardrobe and an audience.

Almost nobody I meet now knows either of those people existed.

I came back to Cooley recently because of a video essay I stumbled on while reading around the idea. It opened with the observation that things tend to come in threes. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Scissors, paper, rock. Beginning, middle and end. And then it added one more to the list: the number of things about yourself you can actually keep alive at any given time.

Three.
Career usually claims one outright. Then something large and non-negotiable — like children, a demanding relationship, or an institution you helped build — tends to claim another. That leaves one, sometimes less. And if you try to force a fourth into the rotation, you don't become a fuller person. You burn out, or something quietly starves while you're actively looking elsewhere. Everyone learns this eventually, usually by violating it first (especially in relationships, myself included).

So the athlete went quiet. Then the cook went quiet. Not through any decision I remember making. The slots simply got claimed by other things, and the things that were not being claimed stopped being fed.

But allow me to be precise, because this is the part I think gets said wrongly:

Three is not how many versions of you there are, it's how many you can give attention to at once.

You might be twelve things. Most people are more than they have time for. The limit isn't on who you are — it's on how much of it you can actively keep in motion before something gives. Attention is the scarce resource, not identity. And when a version of you stops getting attention, it doesn't get deleted. It just stops being topped up.

And here's where I part ways with Cooley, or at least push past him. Read strictly, his version only holds while it's happening. The self is you reading how people see you — so if nobody sees you that way anymore, there's nothing left to read, and the self is gone. By that logic the cook died the moment I stopped cooking for people who knew me as one.

I don't think that's what happens. The people who knew me as a cook didn't stop thinking of me as one just because I stopped. Most of them have no idea I stopped. What they have is still sitting there exactly as it was, and it doesn't need anything from me to stay that way. So when a version of you goes quiet, it isn't that it died. It went quiet because your life stopped making room for it — and that's a separate matter entirely from whether it still exists somewhere.

The proof is that the different people who knew each version of me never compare notes.

Right now, at this hour, several versions of me are fully alive in different heads. To The Torch, I'm Head of Sponsorships and Partnerships. To someone who watched me across campus last semester, I'm the guy who daily broke dress code openly and casually and seemed cool for it — a self I did not construct and cannot access, but which exists, totally intact, in his head. To someone else, I'm the person that seems to be somewhere near the centre of every large thing that happens on campus, from Tech Week to the AI&BIV summit. And to the people at the golf club back home, I'm still that young man who is really good at golf. Not was, is. Present tense. Because nothing that happened at Babcock ever reached them, and they've had no reason to update.

None of these people are wrong. None of them are in contact. There's no central version being maintained somewhere that they're all approximating badly.

The consoling way to tell this story is seasonal: one thing goes quiet, another patiently waits, and when the season turns it returns to you. It's a kind story. But I don’t think it’s quite true.

I think that nothing waits. Waiting implies a version of yourself sitting in the dark, holding its breath, hoping to be picked again, and that's not what's happening. The cook in me isn't waiting. The cook is fully alive in Mr Opara — my Food and Nutrition teacher's memory, and in the heads of everyone I ever fed, in his jacket, with his name on it, exactly as he was. He didn't wait for me. He didn't need to. He's simply still there, in people I no longer see.

I suspect that if I ran into Mr Opara tomorrow, I would become that cook again on the spot. Not permanently. Just for the length of the conversation. He would look at me a certain way, and I would find myself standing in my jacket, talking about heat and technique like someone who never left. That's the whole thing, really. That version of yourself doesn't need to be revived. It needs someone present who still holds it.

Which is, strangely, less sad than the alternative, because it means nothing was lost. What decides which three get attention isn't only time — it's where you are in your life. I'm not a competitive swimmer anymore because this stage of my life has no room for one, not because I stopped being capable of it, that's a different thing. And stages move. The versions of self that are viable at twenty aren't the ones that are viable at forty, and the ones that go quiet now are not ruled out forever. It's entirely possible I come back to cooking at fifty. Someone hands me a kitchen and enough time, and there he is.

So when someone asks what you do, understand what is actually being asked, and what you’re actually doing when you answer. You're not summarising yourself. You literally can't. You're picking one of your versions and handing it over, and hoping it's the one that's useful here.

Ask me again in ten years. I bet I hand you a different one, and it'll be just as true.

Kachi Obata ‘28, Head of Sponsorships & Partnerships, lives in Welch Hall