As extreme as this last sounds, many of us threaten our personal welfare and our lives every day to maintain our identity which we feel we possess and which possesses us in return. We can recall my student who cheated on her diet for diabetes. Many of us know others who suffer the same paradox of care. People can identify themselves with their condition: "I have (possess) diabetes." They can also identify themselves with something contrary to the first identification; "I love (possess) fried foods and candy." People can maintain such dissonant beliefs and feelings because they identify with both these elements of condition and choice as integral parts of their identity. They feel they must hold on to their identity in order to live at all (Please fill in the blanks): "It's _____ to die for," or "I couldn't live if I didn't have _____." In that they feel they have these contradictory elements within the identity they have, they feel powerfully that they can't surrender or lose either of them no matter how much cognitive dissonance they produce. They may not consciously know Fromm's question, "I you are what you have, and you lose what you have, who are you?" but they act as if they do. Some of us feel we are what we have, and we hold on to what we have for dear life—even if it kills us.
Most if not all dependencies of every kind contain these paradoxical elements of identity. Once we feel a dependency, we also feel we have all the elements we wish for our identity no matter how detrimental these elements are to our wellbeing, even to the becoming whole being itself. In the threat we can pose to ourselves through our identity pursuits, we threaten our relationship with our becoming self as we threaten our physical being as well. For many, the physical threat looms immediately in terms of life and death, but for many others, such a threat remains far off, abstract, and ignorable. When we can satisfy our identity needs of the present, meaning perspectives about we need to live, we give up choices we could make in the future. So long as we can continue to have these material need fulfillments, we forget that we can't take them with us. We forget that we do not posses them at all. We can only borrow anything material, and one of our identity needs we feel may well come in being able to forget about the reality of the ephemeral nature of material life, to be distracted by what the world has to offer.[158] In that way, we make the Mephistophelian bargain; we violate the ends principle within ourselves. We make our being a means to end of our having, and in the end, we lose it all.