"We are constantly creating ourselves by what we move toward or away from"
About this Quote
Selfhood isn’t a thing you discover in a quiet room; it’s a trail you lay down by choosing what to approach and what to avoid. Weinberg’s line lands because it yanks identity out of the realm of private essence and plants it in motion. “Constantly” does the heavy lifting: this isn’t a one-time reinvention montage, it’s the mundane, repeated micro-tilts of attention, desire, fear, and refusal. The self becomes a verb.
As a psychologist, Weinberg is smuggling in a clinical insight without clinical language: our patterns of attraction and aversion are not just symptoms, they’re architects. What you move toward signals your values (or your cravings); what you move away from reveals your anxieties, shame points, and learned alarms. The subtext is mildly accusatory in a useful way. You don’t get to pretend you’re neutral. Avoidance is action, too, and over time it hardens into personality: the friend who “isn’t a people person” may be a person who practiced retreat until it felt like a trait.
Context matters here because Weinberg’s career intersected with a cultural fight over what counted as “real” identity, especially around sexuality and stigma. Read through that lens, the quote doubles as an anti-essentialist argument and a quiet rebuke to pathologizing labels: people aren’t fixed categories; they’re shaped by what society rewards them for approaching and punishes them for nearing.
It’s also a warning about drift. If you don’t choose your toward, your away will choose you.
As a psychologist, Weinberg is smuggling in a clinical insight without clinical language: our patterns of attraction and aversion are not just symptoms, they’re architects. What you move toward signals your values (or your cravings); what you move away from reveals your anxieties, shame points, and learned alarms. The subtext is mildly accusatory in a useful way. You don’t get to pretend you’re neutral. Avoidance is action, too, and over time it hardens into personality: the friend who “isn’t a people person” may be a person who practiced retreat until it felt like a trait.
Context matters here because Weinberg’s career intersected with a cultural fight over what counted as “real” identity, especially around sexuality and stigma. Read through that lens, the quote doubles as an anti-essentialist argument and a quiet rebuke to pathologizing labels: people aren’t fixed categories; they’re shaped by what society rewards them for approaching and punishes them for nearing.
It’s also a warning about drift. If you don’t choose your toward, your away will choose you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reinvention |
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