Don't ask 'who am I,' ask 'what do I do every day': 20,112 rat tails and the end of identity-as-noun

Author: Дністер
Published: 2026-06-02T07:38:08.000Z
Language: en
URL: https://neurodrift.org/en/blog/povedinkovi-proksi/
Original (Ukrainian): https://neurodrift.org/blog/povedinkovi-proksi/
Tags: identity, behavior, metrics, psychology
Original source: https://neurodrift.org/blog/povedinkovi-proksi/

You can live a decade inside a beautiful self-description that never once passed a behavioral check. 'Who am I' can't be measured — only what you do, and how often, can. From the rats of Hanoi and Goodhart's law to OKRs, the SEALs, and a basket of six proxies: how to read yourself by the action log, not by the fog.

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On 21 June 1902, Hanoi killed 20,112 rats in a single day. The next week there were more rats.

I. Hanoi: the city that started farming tails

In the early 20th century the French colonial administration built Hanoi a modern sewer system. It was meant to be a showcase of empire — proof that a wild land had been civilized. Instead the underground pipes turned out to be the perfect metro for rats: dark, warm, a tunnel network across the whole city. The pride of modernization became its own incubator of plague.

The authorities did what every bureaucracy under pressure does: they announced a bounty. Money for each rat killed. But hauling dead rats around is awkward and unhygienic, so they paid for a proxy — the rat's tail. Hand in a tail, get a coin.

And the hunt exploded. The counter climbed feverishly: 7,985 tails in the last week of April, 15,041 by the end of May, peaking at 20,112 rats in a single day, on 21 June 1902. On paper — a triumph. The metric gleams. The empire defeats nature.

And then inspectors started meeting rats around Hanoi without tails. Alive. Scurrying. People understood the system faster than the system understood itself: why kill a rat if they pay for the tail? Cut off the tail, release the rat back into the pipes — let it breed you more tails. The cleverest started farming rats outright. The metric soared into the sky. There were more rats than before the program.

 Pay for the tail, you get a rat farm. This isn't a fable about colonial Hanoi. It's a fundamental law of what happens to anyone who confuses the indicator with the goal — especially when they aim that indicator at themselves.

The sewer was meant to make the city civilized — it became a metro for rats. In the same way, our self-improvement systems were meant to make us more honest with ourselves — and often become a sewer for self-deception. Hanoi isn't a quirky example at the end of the article. Hanoi is the prologue to everything about how a person lies to themselves about who they are. Hold the image of the tailless rat in your head: we'll meet it more than once. Including in the mirror.

!A hand holds up a caught rat by the tail against a colonial Hanoi street; in the shadow a live, tailless rat scurries away.

The classic trap in a single frame: when you pay for the tail, the city fills with tailless rats. Any single indicator gets gamed sooner or later.

II. The noun as an anesthetic

Now about the mirror. The most popular question in the world of self-knowledge is "who am I?" It sounds deep, honest, almost spiritual. And it is almost always — an anesthetic.

Because "who am I" is a question people ask not for the truth. It's cheaper than action. Softer than proof. More pleasant than an audit. It lets you live for years inside an image of yourself without paying the behavioral price for that image. "I'm working on myself" — and you already feel like someone who's working, even if the action log is empty.

The answer to "who am I" always arrives as a noun: I'm a leader. I'm a creative person. I'm a good father. I'm a strategist. I'm strong. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm not like the others. That's not identity. That's an internal PR department — a service that puts out press releases about you around the clock, for a single subscriber: you.

 A noun pats you. A verb cuts. A noun says: "I am like this." A verb asks: "when was the last time?"

I'm not writing this from the outside, as a cold observer. In 2018 I wrote down for myself six behaviors meant to hold me together: read, wake early, train, get a lot done, publish, take risks. Back then it sounded like a private crutch — a way to prove to myself I hadn't fallen apart. Only years later did I understand what I'd intuitively built: it was my first anti-Goodhart, a basket against self-deception. But we'll get to that. First we have to understand why the noun doesn't work in principle.

III. Operationalism: a concept without an operation is warm fog

In 1927 the physicist Percy Bridgman formulated an idea that quietly turned science over: the meaning of a concept is the set of operations by which you measure it. "We mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations," he wrote. "Length" isn't a Platonic essence; it's what you get when you apply a ruler. No operation — no concept. Just a word that keeps you warm.

Apply this to "who am I." What ruler do you use to measure "I'm a good person"? "I'm a leader"? "I'm creative"? None. These are concepts without operations — therefore, by Bridgman, concepts without content. Not even lies. Worse: warm fog, pleasant to inhale and impossible to weigh.

But one thing can always be measured: what you do, and how often. And here it helps to switch the metaphor from gentle to judicial. Because a self-description is a defense attorney you hired to acquit you. Behavior is a different figure in the courtroom:

 Behavior isn't a mood. It's a witness.
 Frequency isn't motivation. It's the interrogation protocol: not "are you sometimes kind," but "how many times in the last month."
 A proxy is the court, where your "I" is obliged to present evidence, not read out a character reference it wrote for itself.

A behavioral proxy is an observable substitute for an unmeasurable essence. "I'm curious" testifies to nothing. "I read 103 books this year, here's the list" — that's a witness who can be cross-examined. The whole difference between who you think you are and who you are fits inside that gap.

IV. Civilization stopped believing words long ago

The idea that personality reduces to measurable behavior feels cold — right up until you notice that every institution that takes results seriously is built on it. And not as a list of examples, but as a ladder of severity: the higher the stakes, the less they trust self-description.

 
 DomainWhat it measuresWhat it proves
 
 
 BusinessOKRs (Objective + Key Results)Organizations don't believe words. They measure outcomes
 MilitarySEAL selection / BUD/SThe body doesn't lie as easily as self-description: ~70–80% attrition
 SportHeart rate, VO2 max, sleep, powerFitness is a signal, not a mood
 PsychologyImplementation intentions ("if–then")A concrete loop beats a vague intention: d ≈ 0.65
 Personal lifeYour basket of proxiesIdentity is best run like a portfolio, not a slogan
 

Andy Grove at Intel didn't ask engineers whether they were "committed" — he asked: what's the Objective, and by which Key Results is it measured? John Doerr carried that grammar to Google. The Navy doesn't ask a SEAL candidate whether he's brave: it runs BUD/S, and 70–80% drop out before the finish. "Bravery" here isn't a self-description but what's left once the proxy filters have done their work under pressure.

And the subtlest case — psychology. The Gollwitzer & Sheeran meta-analysis (2006), pooling 94 independent tests, showed: when a person converts the intention "I want to" into a concrete behavioral loop "if situation X arises, I'll do action Y," their odds of reaching the goal rise with an effect of d ≈ 0.65 — which is a lot. Not "want it more." Not "understand more deeply who you are." Just bind the action to a trigger and count the reps. Even the science of motivation has long measured the behavioral loop, not the self-feeling.

!A single composite scene: an OKR whiteboard, a pre-dawn military obstacle course, and a fitness tracker on a wrist, joined by one light.

OKRs, special-forces selection, a fitness tracker — three faces of one gesture: measure a person by action, not by the word about them.

And only one person in this whole landscape still describes themselves in nouns without operations — you, alone with yourself, at two in the morning. "I'm a failure." "I'm doing great." "I'm broken." No ruler, no witness. The entire serious civilization around you stopped asking people who they are a century ago. Your internal monologue still takes it on faith.

V. Why proxies work: evidence, pressure, frequency

Reason one — they can be failed. "100 books a year" is either done or not. That's exactly why a proxy drives you: what can't be failed creates no pressure to do it. "Well-read" never fails — and therefore never moves you.

Reason two — evidence. The psychologist John Norcross tracked two groups that wanted the same changes for a year. Those who framed it as a declared behavior were still on course six months later in 46% of cases — versus 4% of those who wanted the same thing but didn't declare it. Declared, measurable behavior made people roughly 10× more likely to make it.

Reason three — architecture. BJ Fogg showed that behavior arises not from character but when three things converge at once: motivation, ability, and a prompt. So "being disciplined" isn't a trait to find in yourself — it's a construction to assemble. And James Clear put the consequence best: "Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become." No single action changes you. But the votes accumulate — and become evidence.

Identity isn't what you think about yourself in the dark. It's the trace your repeated actions leave on the world. And the only honest question isn't "who am I" but "what action log can I present as evidence."

A proxy turns fog into a dashboard. Instead of "I think I'm sliding" — three needles that show exactly where you are. You can respond to a dashboard. To fog you can only feel anxious. Fog never fails. It just moves the deadline to the next decade.

VI. When the proxy becomes a monster

Now back to the tailless rats — because without this section everything said above would be a dangerous half-truth.

In 1975 the economist Charles Goodhart formulated a law that the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern cast into a perfect phrase: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Donald Campbell added the same about social indicators: the harder you press on a metric for decision-making, the more it gets distorted. The tail instead of the rat.

The costliest modern example — Wells Fargo. The bank gave employees a proxy: "eight products per customer." The employees met it the way all cornered people do: they opened around 3.5 million accounts customers never asked for. The result — a $3 billion settlement and a burned reputation.

 Wells Fargo didn't fail the metric. It met it. That's exactly why it's frightening. The trap isn't that people measure badly — it's that they optimize the wrong proxy too well.

And here's the row of the table that concerns you:

 
 CaseProxyWhat got gamedPrice
 
 
 Hanoi, 1902Rat tailsThey farmed rats for the tailsMore rats
 Wells Fargo8 products/customer3.5M fake accounts$3B + reputation
 YouOne metric of "success"Playing the number instead of livingBurnout, depression, emptiness
 

Make ONE proxy the sole measure of yourself — "revenue only," "weight on the bar only," "likes only," "hours next to the kid only" — and you become the Hanoi rat-farmer. "100 books" becomes a tail if you flip pages for the counter. "10,000 steps" becomes a tail. "$100k in revenue" becomes a tail. "I'm a good father" becomes a tail if you measure hours of presence instead of presence. Every proxy has its rat. The job is not to fall in love with the tail.

VII. A basket instead of an idol

The takeaway from Goodhart is not "abandon proxies." That's a surrender back into the fog, where those who carry a beautiful self-description for decades quietly fail to happen. The takeaway is different: a proxy is a powerful servant and a terrible master. And what saves you from slavery isn't refusal — it's number.

One instrument in a plane can lie. Six instruments that contradict each other save lives — a pilot is trained to trust not one needle but their aggregate. The same in investing: one metric is an all-in bet on a single asset; a basket of proxies is behavioral portfolio management. It doesn't guarantee happiness, but it sharply cuts the risk of self-bankruptcy. One proxy is easy to game. Six — almost impossible, because you can't game them all at once without actually living.

!A basket or tray holding six different symbolic objects: a book, a dumbbell, an alarm clock, a chart, a manuscript, a die.

A basket of six proxies. No single one can become an idol, because the other five pull in different directions. You can't lie to a system the way you lie to one number.

How do you tell a proxy that serves from one that lies? A good one has six features:

 
 FeatureQuestion to the proxy
 
 
 ObservableIs it visible from outside, or in an action log?
 FrequentCan you count reps / hours / cycles?
 FailableCan I honestly say "didn't do it"?
 Hard to gameIs it hard to fake without the real goal?
 BalancedDo other proxies hold it in check?
 AliveDoes it still fit my current phase of life?
 

And right away a safeguard, without which all this becomes a cult of cold productivity. Not everything important can be measured. But almost everything important leaves behavioral traces. Love doesn't reduce to "three evenings without a phone." But if there are zero such evenings in a year, then the question "am I a good father?" stops being a question and becomes rhetorical. A proxy doesn't measure love. It catches its absence.

VIII. My 6-proxy experiment

Now I can come back to that 2018 crutch as an adult. I wrote down my identity as six behavioral proxies — read, wake, train, get things done, publish, take risks — and I've kept them as a living file ever since (there's a separate piece in the series on that, "Berserk as operational identity").

And here's why I haven't turned into a Hanoi rat-farmer: I have six of them, not one. When early discipline sags — reading and the business hold. When the business dips — the body and the writing hold. No single proxy can become an idol, because five others stand beside it, pulling in different directions. The basket balances itself — and that's what saved me from the smoothest form of burnout: the one where a person diligently games a single number for years, certain they're living, while actually just feeding a tail.

The last line of that 2018 formula read: "diversify, so the depression doesn't hit hard." At 25 I thought it was about risk. Today I see it was an intuitive Goodhart rule, formulated seven years before I read Goodhart. Don't put everything on one proxy — or it eats you. I wrote down the antidote to the trap before I knew its name.

IX. How to build your own dashboard

Not theory, but an operation for this week. Take one of your fog-nouns and translate it into a basket of verbs. Here's what that looks like:

 
 Fog (noun)Bad single proxyBetter basket (3–5 behaviors)
 
 
 I'm a good fatherHours at homePhone-free evenings · 1:1 talks · I know his fears · shared rituals
 I'm an entrepreneurRevenueNew leads · follow-ups · closed deals · delegated systems · cash buffer
 I'm healthyWeightSleep · strength · steps · bloodwork · energy level
 I'm a creative personNumber of ideasPublished pieces · drafts · deep-work hours · feedback loops
 I'm a strategist"I think a lot"Decision log · scenarios · post-mortems · bad bets avoided
 

 Name the fog. One noun you believe about yourself.
 Translate it into 3–5 proxies by the matrix above: observable, frequent, failable.
 Make it a basket, not a number. Because one you'll eventually start to game — and it will lie to you most convincingly of all.
 Set a reminder a year out. Audit: how many proxies are alive, how many obsolete, how many turned into tails.

X. In place of a conclusion

The real subject of this text isn't "how to measure yourself correctly." The real subject is harsher: a person is capable of living for decades inside a beautiful self-description that never once passed a behavioral check. "I'm a good father," "I'm a creator," "I'll still have time to become who I feel I am" — and twenty years of fog no one ever weighed.

The coldness of this method is frightening. Yes, a person is more than their metrics — there's the unscripted crying, the quiet presence, the love you can't drop into a spreadsheet. All of that is true. But between two mistakes — "reduce yourself to numbers" and "live in a fog of nouns that demands nothing" — the second kills more quietly and more reliably. Fog doesn't hurt. It doesn't argue. It just eats decades.

 You are not your numbers. But without behavioral evidence you very quickly become your excuses. A metric won't tell the whole truth about you — but fog won't even tell you a lie you can check. Don't fall in love with the tail. Keep the rat in sight.

 Sources & context
 
 The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt (1902): a bounty on tails → people farmed rats; ~20,112 in a single day, 21 June 1902. Vann, M. G., The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt (Oxford UP). NB: the "Delhi cobra" origin story is apocryphal; the Hanoi rats are documented — 
 Bridgman, P. W. (1927). The Logic of Modern Physics: "We mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations" (operationalism) — 
 Goodhart, C. (1975) + Strathern, M. (1997): "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"; Campbell's law (1979) — 
 Wells Fargo cross-selling scandal: an "8 products/customer" quota → ~3.5M fake accounts; $3B settlement (DOJ/SEC, 2020) — 
 OKRs: Andy Grove (Intel) → John Doerr, Measure What Matters (2018) — 
 Gollwitzer, P. M. & Sheeran, P. (2006). "Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes," Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38: 69–119. 94 independent tests, d ≈ 0.65 — 
 Norcross, J. C. (2002), J. Clinical Psychology (PMID 11920693): at 6 months, 46% of resolvers vs 4% of nonresolvers — 
 Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits: "every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become." BJ Fogg: Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt — , 
 Quantified Self: Wolf & Kelly, Wired, 2007 — "self-knowledge through numbers." Navy SEAL (BUD/S) selection: ~70–80% attrition (US Navy data / Sandboxx).
 Personal context: the author's own 6-proxy "Berserk" formula (2018) and the line "diversify, so the depression doesn't hit hard" as an intuitive Goodhart antidote.