I hope you don’t mind that I made your link clickable ... much more useful for readers that way.

So, you mention “psychology books” in your post ... were/are you a psych major?

While I found the identity traps idea interesting when I first read Browne’s book, what I have concluded since then is that situations are typically more complex than that. In my own life, for example, I have tried to make myself become someone else for another—someone who I thought would be more interesting/desirable/suitable to the other person. Of course, not having a direct line into that other’s head, I was sometimes wildly wrong. That more than anything else brought home the lesson of the importance of being oneself.

Humans are fundamentally pattern-seeking organisms; we prefer a certain amount of predictability and order (that “certain amount” takes on a wide range of values across the population) and can have difficulties when they aren’t met. That said, successfully navigating a balance between patterns and novelty is one of the tricks that’s part of an interesting and fulfilling life.