I want to tell you about a morning that changed everything for me.
I woke up, and nothing was wrong. The job was fine. The relationship was fine. The apartment, the routine, the salary, all fine. On paper, I had what I was supposed to want.
But I couldn't move.
Not because I was tired. Not because I was lazy. Because some part of me had stopped believing in the life I was performing.
I told myself it was burnout. I told myself I needed a vacation, a break, maybe a new hobby. But deep down, I knew that wasn't it. Something had cracked, a fracture so thin I could barely see it, but I felt it every single morning when the alarm went off and my first instinct wasn't to rise. It was to disappear.
Maybe you know this feeling.
You've built something. You've achieved things. From the outside, your life looks like it's working. But inside, there's this quiet tension that won't go away. This sense that you're playing a role in a movie you didn't write. This exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix.
And here's what I want you to understand, what took me years to figure out:
You are not falling apart. You are outgrowing an identity that was never fully yours.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
We don't choose our first identity. We inherit it.
Humans don't begin life through autonomy. They begin through imitation.
Think about it. When you were a kid, you didn't sit down and decide who you were going to be. You figured out through trial and error, through reward and punishment which version of you kept the adults around you calm. Which behaviors earned approval. Which parts of you were welcomed, and which parts needed to be hidden.
You learned that approval meant safety. That obedience meant belonging. That fitting in meant survival.
And so you built an identity around those lessons. Not because you chose to because you had to.
By adulthood, this inherited identity has shaped your career, your temperament, your ambition ceiling, your relational patterns, even the emotions you allow yourself to feel. It has dictated which version of you is permitted to exist.
Until the internal world evolves. Until the identity can no longer stretch.
so here's the problem: that identity was built for a world that no longer exists. It was built for childhood. For survival. For fitting into systems that may not even matter to you anymore.
I'll tell you exactly how this played out in my life.
In 2014, I was living in Amsterdam with what looked like a solid path. I'd gone straight from being a professional footballer to studying hotel management because it was the safe, familiar option my family understood. And honestly, it made sense at the time. It gave me structure when I needed it.
But here's what I couldn't see back then: I wasn't choosing an identity. I was choosing the identity that made everyone else comfortable.
From that moment, the script wrote itself. A polished hospitality degree. A respectable career in Amsterdam. A predictable path with predictable milestones. On the outside, it looked like I was doing things right.
But internally, I was disappearing.
I became obedient. Agreeable. I became the version of myself that wouldn't make too much noise. I was falling into the matrix becoming a sheep with tunnel vision, mistaking the standard path for my actual path.
Meanwhile, the gap between who I was and who I was performing kept widening. And the bigger that gap became, the more I escaped into the only world that made the misalignment feel quiet: the wildness of Amsterdam. The nightlife. The stimulation. The chaos. The constant motion that kept me from feeling anything real.
And here's the paradox: I had been an athlete; disciplined, driven, structured. But now I was living the complete opposite. Not because I wanted that life. Because it distracted me from the life I didn't want to admit I was living.
Every weekend took me further from the person I respected. Every escape pushed me deeper into an identity I didn't recognize.
My nervous system took the hit. Panic cycles. Internal shutdowns. The hair loss started; a physical reminder that I was trying to hold together a life that was pulling me apart.
The truth was simple: I wasn't breaking down because Amsterdam was overwhelming. I was breaking down because I was hiding from myself.
The rebellious part of me, the one that never fit neatly into any box, had been silent for years. But in 2014, he woke up. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just with one undeniable realization:
I was performing a life that wasn't mine. A life that made sense on paper, made others proud, checked every box; except the one that mattered.
Then, quietly, something snapped back into place.
The rebel reappeared. Not the reckless one. The honest one. The one who refused to live a life that shrinks him just because it keeps everyone else calm.
And with that came the first sovereign decision of my adult life: I quit everything. No masterplan. No strategic next step. Just a one-way ticket to Asia; not to escape, but to reclaim the identity I had abandoned.
For the first time in years, I wasn't performing. I was choosing.
And the moment I chose, the old identity fell apart, because it was never mine to begin with.
That's what identity expiration looks like. Not a dramatic collapse. A quiet refusal. A moment when you stop protecting what has already died.
Here's what nobody tells you about that cracking feeling:
Your body detects the fracture before your mind does.
Identity doesn't expire in thought first. It expires in the nervous system. When the identity you're performing no longer matches who you are in the process to become, the autonomic nervous system reads this mismatch as instability; a threat to internal coherence.
I used to think my anxiety was random. I thought my irritability was stress. I thought my exhaustion was just... life.
But it wasn't random. My nervous system was trying to tell me something.
So it reacts. Not symbolically. Mechanically.
Irritability without clear cause. Anxiety that spikes in the absence of danger. Gut disruption. Emotional volatility. Fatigue that no rest repairs. Shutdown cycles. The paralysis that arrives precisely when a decision matters most.
Your vagus nerve, the wandering pathway that connects brainstem to gut to heart, doesn't distinguish between a predator in the brush and an identity under threat. To the nervous system, becoming someone new registers as the same category of danger as being hunted. Cortisol floods the bloodstream. The prefrontal cortex dims. The body prepares for survival, not transformation.
Not because life is too much.
Because your current identity is evolving…
Your nervous system doesn't protect your potential. It protects your patterns. So when a larger version of you starts pushing through more ambitious, more authentic, more sovereign; your biology sends alarms. Not because you're in danger. But because the internal map you've relied on is dissolving, and your body doesn't recognize the new terrain.
This is why guilt shows up when you think about leaving. This is why fear spikes when you imagine change. This is why doubt multiplies right at the threshold of something meaningful.
Your body is trying to stabilize an identity you are outgrowing.
The world changes. People don't. And that mismatch destroys them.
Now, I want to share something that took me a long time to see.
We're living through the fastest identity-disruption era in human history.
Think about it. There are 19-year-olds making millions on Shopify who never finished secondary school. Kids who dropped out to build e-commerce brands are now teaching business to MBAs. YouTubers in their early twenties are out-earning executives who spent thirty years climbing corporate ladders. A teenager with a ring light and an iPhone can build a six-figure audience faster than a marketing agency with a hundred employees.
MrBeast started making videos in his bedroom at 13. He's now worth $500 million. Alex Hormozi went from sleeping in a gym to building a $100 million portfolio by his mid-thirties. Emma Chamberlain turned vlogs into a coffee empire. These aren't outliers anymore — they're signals. The old playbook is dead.
And yet — most of us are still operating with identities designed for a world that moved slower. For a world where you picked a career at 22 and rode it to retirement. For a world where stability was the goal and patience was the strategy.
That world is gone.
Identity expiration is not a personal crisis. It's the inevitable outcome of evolution outpacing the identities we cling to.
Most people spend their entire life inside an unconscious repetition. The pattern is almost universal:
Inherit identity from family, culture, school. Perform it because it earns approval. Mistake performance for authenticity. Feel guilt when reality contradicts the role. Suppress the future vision they have for themself to maintain belonging. Build internal friction. Watch their nurvous system collapse which is signaling misalignment. They start questioning everything. Imagining a different life. Feeling guilt again because in your unconscience, the old identity still demands loyalty.
Most people get trapped between imagination and guilt. The new identity can be felt. The current identity still holds emotional authority. Biology alarms. Fear spikes. Guilt paralyzes.
So they shrink back to comfort into the old identity.
But the suffering intensifies. Because the idea of their current identity that they are protecting is already dead.
So what actually happens when an identity expires?
I've thought about this a lot both in my own life and working with people going through it. And I've noticed there's a pattern. Almost everyone goes through the same cycle.
It starts with internal friction. Your body starts rejecting the identity you're performing. You feel it as tension, restlessness, a sense of wrongness you can't name.
Then comes psychological disruption. Guilt shows up. Resentment. Boredom. Meaninglessness. And you can't point to a clear cause which makes it worse.
Then something new starts pushing through. Identity emergence. New desires. New thoughts. Ideas about who you could be that feel exciting and terrifying at the same time.
But then your system fights back. Biological resistance. Stress increases. Anxiety spikes. Your nervous system is clinging to the familiar, even though the familiar is killing you.
And you start to notice something uncomfortable: your environment isn't helping. Conformity crisis. The people around you, the systems you're in, they're all reinforcing the old identity. The one that's already dead.
This brings you to the choice point. The moment where you either stay loyal to the old identity; keep performing, keep shrinking or you walk toward the emerging one.
And if you choose to walk? Embodied sovereignty. Small, consistent choices that anchor the new identity. Day by day. Until your biology adapts. Until the new self becomes the real self.
Identity does not leap. Identity evolves through friction, through rupture, through choice.
So where do you go from here?
I'm not going to give you a five-step process. That's not how this works.
But I will tell you where to look.
Start by noticing where your body collapses when you try to stay the same. Not the story you tell yourself, the physical signal. The tension in your throat before a conversation you've been avoiding. The heaviness in your chest when you agree to something you've already refused internally. The exhaustion that arrives the moment you walk into a room where you have to perform.
Biology doesn't lie.
Pay attention to the decisions you've been avoiding because guilt is holding them hostage. Not whether you should act on them, just name them. See them clearly. The relationship you know is over. The job you've mentally quit. The boundary you've never spoken. The desire you keep burying because it would bother someone.
And if you want to see what this looks like from the outside, watch the first ten minutes of Aronofsky's Black Swan. Not for the story for the fracture. Watch Nina's face when she's performing versus when she's alone. Watch the moment her body knows something her mind won't admit. Study how the crack appears before she can name it.
That's what identity expiration looks like. That tension between who you're performing and who you're becoming. You'll recognize it.
Then ask yourself this question, not to answer quickly, but to sit with:
If I acted today as the person I'm becoming, what would I stop tolerating first?
Let that question stay with you. Let it work on you. The answer will become clear when you're ready to hear it.
Here's what I want to leave you with.
Your life isn't falling apart. Your identity is falling away.
And that is exactly what needed to happen.
Identity expiration is the mechanism that forces you out of structures that no longer match your potential. Most people try to rescue the old identity. They try to make it work. They push through, power through, numb through.
But you don't have to do that.
You're becoming someone the current identity cannot contain.
So the choice is actually simple. Not easy but simple.
You can keep performing the version of you that earned approval. The one that kept you safe. The one that everyone expects.
Or you can step into the identity that can finally carry your potential.
This is Your Own Revolution.
It begins the moment you stop protecting what has already died.
Thanks for reading,
Laurent