Is it really so easy to explain this desire to be someone? If you don't stand out from the litter in some way then you'll be denied attention, will die from neglect. There's a powerful drive at work here, surely, but that's why you learn to care for yourself. And then it is only after the need to survive has been practically assuaged that the real craving for identity seems to kick in. It was never just a matter of survival, you wanted to be, as well, and somehow this needs social proof. There is a difference between being loved and being respected, so that love, which provides not just care but the assurance that you are special and irreplaceable to some powerful, or at least independently significant, other, is insufficient without respect. Feeling loved provides the ground from which you can go out and win respect. Socially, love is not an end but a means. You might gain admiration, or the status of being enviable, independently of being respected. But surely the latter is the more preferable from the point of view of individuation since you can respect yourself but apparently not admire yourself. Those who choose to take admiration or envy directed to themselves as grounds for respect are seen as contemptible, as targets for satire. Is being respected being a personage, being uniquely definable in some way? Any ground of distinction can be twisted into one of respect, but for this to be effective the distinction needs to be socially recognised, to represent a rare status in an objective hierarchy of value. The craving for identity is pervasive but rather opaque. Naturalistic explanations for it are all very well, but they don't expose its strange logic, or rather, they don't sufficiently estrange the logic it persistently exposes.