Identity Is Grounding

Turns out electricity doesn’t dump into dirt. It finds a stable pathway back to its source. Identity works the same way. If you don’t know your source, your energy goes somewhere unstable.

Ryan Eten

12/3/20251 min read

When I was younger my dad gave me a basic understanding of the fundamentals of how electricity works in the home. Oversimplifying, you have 3 wires, hot, neutral, ground. The ground has always been the most mysterious to me. I understand the function, it gives the electric (or energy) a safe place to go if something goes wrong but I got curious where does that energy go? Does it just get buried in the dirt? Am I just electrocuting thousands of bugs? So I had Chatgpt give it to me like a 5th grader and this was the output:

Electricity doesn’t just “dump” into dirt like water.
What it really wants is a path back to the source (usually the transformer on the pole or the utility’s system).

So why does the ground help?

Because the earth is connected to that utility system.
The grounding rod just gives electricity a huge, stable, low-resistance pathway that leads back to the utility’s grounding system.

Energy wants to complete the loop and it finds a way back to its source. The earth is a stable and low resistance pathway back to its source.

So what’s that have to do with identity (and brand)? A true understanding of your identity is the grounding system, it identifies the source which then allows you to create pathways to put your energy when something goes wrong. If your pathway is not a “huge, stable, low resistance pathway” back to the source then your energy is probably going to a small, unstable, high resistance pathway back to ___________.