Identity is one of the themes that runs through Nectar of Time. Below is everything in the Nectarium that touches on it.
Where it comes up 12
Within this theme 66
Concepts 16
- The Shadow (Murakami)
In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The City and Its Uncertain Walls, the separated shadow is the part of the self that reminds you not to lose your passion, creativity and emotions to work.
- Limbo between life and death
Salih's reading of Murakami's other world as a neutral zone between life and death where the body can do impossible things and body and mind separate, so a person loses what they stand for…
- Radicalization
Logan's research field: what leads an otherwise normal person to join an extremist movement or terrorist group, regardless of ideology. He describes recruiters who validate young men's real…
- Compromising vs adapting
Colin's distinction, from Tamir's car-music story: playing music a passenger likes is adapting, a kind gesture from someone who knows what they're doing. Losing your own preferences to…
- Persona
From the cold-open clip: in classical drama the mask was also a megaphone, and 'persona' is Latin for 'that through which the sound passes'. To discover you are a phony through and through…
- Uniqueness as a thumbprint of flaws and talents
Tamir's thesis: uniqueness is made of your talents, special skills, and special mistakes and imperfections. Pure talent is boring and pure imperfection doesn't exist. Hiding that thumbprint…
- Conditioning Basement
Ian's metaphor: through life we throw 'crap' (upbringing, stress, trauma, betrayal, tragedy) into a basement year after year, and it shapes how we think, act and see ourselves. None of it…
- Armor
The patterned version of yourself, a veil or shield of armor built up over years that you present to the world. Behind it is the real you: daydreams, curiosities, what truly makes you…
- Prepackaged Identities
Logan's term for ideologies and labels that young people 'try on' to get a script, a purpose and a sense of being unique, like a 16-year-old calling himself an 'anarcho-crypto-fascist…
- Social Media as Shopping Cart of Symbols
Tamir's image of social media as a shopping cart young people fill with symbols and labels to build an identity. Logan agrees.
- Age of imitators
Tamir's description of today's culture: copying influencers and collecting their 'artifacts' in the hope of becoming them. He contrasts it with Sheela's insistence that she never imitated…
- Living vicariously through characters
Tamir's hypothesis that Murakami, married young, explores alternate life timelines through protagonists who stray from troubled marriages and keep partners in both the real and unreal…
- NPC
A non-playing character. Tamir uses it for people who hide their uniqueness and never make an impact on anyone.
- Hard-boiled structure
Murakami's practice, explained in the archival clip, of borrowing the structure of hard-boiled mysteries, science fiction and love stories without writing in those genres, drawn to the…
- Colorlessness
Tsukuru's name means colorless. Tamir reads it as something like the Zen notion of nothingness or emptiness rather than the Western sense of bland, while noting the translation leaves room…
- Taking the piss
British banter ('taking the mickey'). Tamir says it's common in England, Australia, Texas and New York and painfully absent in Canada. Colin praises Vonnegut as great at it.
Books 12
- Troll
Logan's 2023 novel about Peter Riley, an aspiring actor who becomes the online provocateur and cult leader 'Petrol'. It's written as short, dated fragments (forum posts, lectures…
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Grant loves the opening (which grew from a short story) but quit caring once the narrator sits in a well and astral-projects, which he calls cheating.
- Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
The book-club pick that made Tamir think 'I didn't know a book could do that to me' and pulled him into fiction.
- Kafka on the Shore
Both find it absurd: fish falling from the sky, Colonel Sanders as a pimp. Tamir only recommends it to die-hard fans.
- Steppenwolf
Grant calls it fantastic but 'dripping in imagery', in contrast with the sparing imagery of Japanese prose.
- Dance Dance Dance
Tamir's example of Murakami women as vanishing conduits rather than true romance.
- No Longer Human
Dazai's quasi-memoir about a man who clowns, drinks and ends in a double suicide. Tamir likes it; Grant finds it too self-indulgent and without desire.
- Sputnik Sweetheart
In both guests' top five. Tamir's most indelible visual is Miu on the Ferris wheel seeing herself in her apartment; also the pan-flute music on the Greek island. Salih reads the Ferris…
- Killing Commendatore
Salih's entry into Murakami: on his 30th birthday in April 2018 he opened it in a bookstore and recognized his own wish to flee the city and paint, then finished it in three or four days…
- A Wild Sheep Chase
Mentioned as Grant tries to recall which Murakami book involves twin girlfriends; the twins are actually in Pinball, 1973.
- Rat Trilogy
Murakami's first three novels (Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball 1973, A Wild Sheep Chase), which Tamir recently finished; cited for its unnamed protagonist torn between partners in the real and…
- The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Goffman's 1956 book on the dramaturgical view of social life. Logan refers to it as the 'infamous book back in the '50s' about life as performance and masks. He does not name the title.
People 1
- Erving Goffman
Canadian-American sociologist. Logan cites his 1950s argument that public life is a performance in which everyone wears masks and follows a script until they get home, and then asks what…
Quotes 15
You would be checked and blinded by it at every turn by what you are pleased to call your personality.
For a while I would be obsessed with self-help books and this and that. And I realized the more self-help books I read, the less of a personality I had.
The time to be David Goggins is when you're running and you need to get to the finish line. But you don't need to be David Goggins all the time. Sometimes you have to be Seneca the philosopher. Sometimes you have to be the scientist. Sometimes you have to be the poet.
The shadow is something that reminds you to not lose yourself into work, losing your passion and creativity, losing your emotions.
This is my world. The wall is here to hold me in. The river flows through me. The smoke is me burning.
Who are we if we don't have any creativity or emotions inside our heads?
I didn't do it for you, Colin. I did it for myself.
It's not easy to live in Japan as a loner. And I'm a loner, you know, I'm an individualist.
All of that crap that's being shoved into the basement is not yours. It was taught to you, it was modeled to you, things happened to you.
The longer you've committed and the longer you've made a decision, the more difficult it is to put it under scrutiny. It's painful.
It's interesting when you have your own thumbprint of your mistakes, your talents, your attributes. But when you hide that, that becomes a problem.
Reading fiction opens you more perspective than someone who talks about daily life only, because we're all living in our own world, in our own bubble.
Do it for yourself. Say it for yourself. Act like it for yourself. You don't have to piss anybody off along the way. Just do your own thing.
Those expectations are real. Those expectations have gravity and they carry weight, and it's difficult to conduct yourself without consideration of those expectations.
Rock in the middle of the nowhere. You know, one of the meanings of the word Sheela is rock. The rock on which they write scriptures.
Insights 11
- Ask 'What about me?'
Relationships and lives fall apart, sometimes ending in divorce ten years later, when people forget to ask 'what about me?' Asking what you yourself want is the start of being real.
- Limbo separates body from mind
Murakami's other world is a limbo between life and death where body and mind split, and a person who loses that unity loses what they stand for.
- Your roots explain inherited patterns
Immigrants and their children can lose touch with the people who came before them, and with it the source of the patterns and shame they carry. Living in her ancestral culture let Nev…
- Optimization alone flattens you
Reading only to optimize and grow makes you efficient but personality-less; you miss a whole other side of the world.
- The mask can be mistaken for the self
Kids who grow up online are sometimes taught that the mask they wear is their authentic self. When those lines blur, the result is the widespread confusion about identity and belonging we…
- Hardcore mentality has a time and place
Goggins-style grit is a tool for the finish line, not a personality to live in. A full life asks you to switch between athlete, philosopher, scientist and poet.
- Our drives come from childhood compensations
Many life paths, like needing the Ferrari and then needing it wrapped in neon, are driven by childhood motivations and a search for compensation and validation, and they all rest on how we…
- Sunk commitment resists scrutiny
The longer you've belonged to a religion, team, company or mission, the more it hurts to question it, because doubt forces you to ask what you've done with all those years.
- Your own character is the best influence
Asked which book, film or person shaped her outside Osho's teachings, Sheela names only 'my own character': she did her thing and never imitated. Tamir contrasts this with an age of…
- Everyman protagonists draw you in
Murakami's protagonists are imperfect, passive introverts pulled into situations by extroverts, not superheroes, which makes their strange journeys feel like they could be yours.
- In dreams only feeling is real
Identity is something we hallucinate and agree to while awake. In the dream it dissolves, and what remains real is what we feel. We feel more at night because we are less distracted.
Practices 1
- List what you won't compromise on
Write down, or just think through, the things you care about and won't compromise on. Being secure in them, such as playing your own album and offering theirs next time, is what makes you…
Stories 9
- Satisfied Customer excerpt from Troll
Tamir reads an undated page-15 excerpt from Troll by a user called 'Satisfied Customer'. It is a stream of a young person's online mind: irony pulled over the eyes, Mario speedruns, vanilla…
- Immigrant child discovering her roots
Nev's parents moved to Toronto in 1996, when she was nine months old, and she grew up Canadian with only brief summer trips to the Balkans. Living there, she came to understand her father's…
- Six and a half hours under hypnosis
Samantha joined Marilyn's QHHT waiting list in 2020 and saw her in 2021 for a whole-day session. She thought she was under 45 minutes to an hour; the recording shows about five and a half…
- A closeted kid in 1980s rural Alberta
Tyler had a great childhood, with a huge extended family and great parents, but was in the closet with no role models, living a dark double life and feeling locked into a bad fate. Frankl…
- Isaac's ironed shirt
A young employee who always had the worst luck came to work one day in a crisp, ironed shirt and tie. When Colin, his boss, complimented him, he snapped, 'I didn't do it for you, did I?'…
- Mother's message: let me go
On her first ayahuasca ceremony, Mia felt her mother tell her 'let me go': stop thinking about what I want and live your life. It was hard because she didn't know who she was outside 'the…
- Petrol's origin in Logan's own fear
Peter Riley's starting point, the terror of an ordinary nine-to-five life and the sense of being destined for more, came from Logan at 19. He now calls that view naive, though it felt very…
- Sad goodbye to the shadow
Salih read Hard-Boiled Wonderland in winter and was left sad and melancholic by the shadow's hard goodbye at the end. Tamir reads the passage aloud and Salih recalls the narrator staring at…
- Irish American
Colin is puzzled by Americans who call themselves 'Irish American' without being born in Ireland. He reads it as people looking for something to make them feel a bit more authentic and…
Films, music and art 1
- Murakami early-1990s interview
Rare early-90s interview clip played in the cold open, in which Murakami explains he borrows hard-boiled, sci-fi and love-story structures without writing those genres, and calls himself a…