The ideal self

This afternoon, upon returning to my office after a meeting, I discovered that a friend had left the following on the whiteboard wall behind my desk. (He later told me that he had had to walk out of microeconomics to come write it down, lest it be overwhelmed by Ricardian equivalence.)

Epiphany (3/15): The real self is a diminished version of the ideal self.

I laughed and called my friend a neo-platonist. And then it occurred to me that my epiphany of the year could well be summed up as the reverse. The self that I have held as ideal is a truncated version of who I really am; it's the subset of my identity that I have deemed worthy or "good enough."

Good enough for what, I'm not sure.