As we go through life and we grow through our formal education systems, learning about physics, math, literature and various other absolutely fundamental systems of knowledge, we tend to leave out, in my mind, something a little more crucial, an understanding of what we can expect to see from ourselves and the people around us as we start to mature.

Friendship at school is a basic thing, women develop a core tribe of a few friends that tend to take the maxim of their energy, while men tend to garner a lot more friends with a lower signal to noise ratio on friendship, thus creating greater network with slightly less individual effort. These relationships are easy to maintain as we're forced into shared experiences, we are all at the same time dealing with bullies, puberty, learning how to stumble around the opposite sex and rebellion in general.

Our early twenties we spend bounding from relationship to relationship, or one-night-stand to one-night-stand, depending of course on your level of hedonism or ability to lubricate socially, and then something incredible happens: Social Genocide.

Slowy, at first, the tree spanning fractals of your social groups start dropping nodes, two at a time. The entire reason for becoming social eats it's own tail, and the division and rift starts to happen. Not just based on couples who no longer maintain relationships with as much fever as they may have previously, but through context switching, too many people, doing too many things, and slowly the tragedy of the human dilema slips in, and the realisation occurs: Who do I identify with? I feel alone. Where do I go from here? I have no information, I didn't know to expect this.

This can be a terrifying place, it is also the place of freedom. It is a place where you have the ability to shift your perception of who you are into who you want to be, because your identity lies within your own hands, rather than the hands of those that you've known all your life. Your life starts to shape itself under self-review, rather than peer review, and if you take that step to respond to it, you have the ability, not to be lonely, rather to be free.

Who are you, when the only person you need to share with is yourself?