Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Grant

Identity is pitched here less as self-expression than as a practical technology: a way to compress the chaos of living into something you can act on. Richard Grant’s phrasing - “of course” and “so often” - does quiet rhetorical work. “Of course” tries to naturalize the claim, as if any attentive person has already noticed the pattern: people who can name themselves tend to move with more direction. “So often” backstops that confidence with a caveat, admitting the messiness of real lives without surrendering the point.

The subtext is that purpose rarely arrives as a thunderbolt. It’s usually smuggled in through affiliation: nation, class, craft, faith, family, scene. Identity isn’t just an inner truth; it’s an itinerary. Once you belong to something (or insist that you do), a list of implied obligations and narratives shows up. You don’t merely want things; you are the kind of person who wants those things. That’s the value: fewer decisions feel arbitrary.

Grant, as a travel and cultural writer, is attuned to how identity becomes legible in motion - how people tell themselves coherent stories when they cross borders, switch jobs, lose status, or start over. In that context, the line reads like a field note about modern drift: when institutions and shared scripts weaken, identity becomes the plug-in replacement for meaning.

There’s also a warning embedded in the praise. If identity can deliver purpose “so often,” it can also counterfeit it. The same mechanism that steadies you can harden into performance, tribalism, or a purpose that’s borrowed, not chosen.