Identity, Paperwork, and the Currency of Truth in Modern Society

Some people live with the belief that identity is written on their face and that walking the streets without papers is a risk many will gladly take to prove nothing more than who they appear to be. In this narrative, a person carries not just a national ID but a handful of credentials: a driver’s license, a passport, a Social Security card, a public library card, and even little receipts. All of them are presented as proof that the holder is unmistakably themselves when necessary. Yet beneath that certainty lies a quiet question: if the name etched on every card is real, how much of a person remains when those marks fade? The thought that Juan José Millás could mistake the speaker for someone named José Pérez feels almost comic, and yet it cuts to the heart of how society requires a consistent label to function. When pressed, the speaker asserts a chosen identity, claiming to be Juan José Millás, son of Vicente and Cándida, born January 31, 1946 in Valencia, even if that claim barely convinces themselves. The identity is a tool for administration, a convenient fiction that permits the machinery of law, travel, and record keeping to operate smoothly. So on a street corner, the moment arrives: the cop asks for documentation, and the reason is simple—neither Juan José Millás nor José Pérez can be recognized merely from their appearance. The faces do not carry the truth of their names; the papers do. And to some, even a fake document seems enough to bridge the gap between person and record, as long as the system accepts the story that supports order at that instant. This, in the speaker’s world, is how consensus is formed. A 50 euro bill, a piece of currency, bears no intrinsic value beyond belief. Yet in the shared belief that money exists and can be used as a measure of worth, people invest identity in it. The point is not about the money itself but about what society allows to count as identity. The belief becomes real merely because the group agrees it is, and once the agreement solidifies, it becomes a kind of truth that others must respect, at least in the context of a transaction or a permit. In that sense, identity is a public act, bound to currency, documents, and the social theater that keeps those systems running. If one spends a lifetime surrounded by a pile of currency, a passport, a wallet, and an estate of possessions, that collection ends up shaping the self. It is not just a ledger of who one is but a stage that displays status and access. In fact, material possessions frequently signal status, and with status comes a larger set of documents, more stamps, more verification steps. The more wealth a person has, the more the system tends to treat their signals as legitimate. In practical terms, in the United States a police encounter can reveal stark differences in how identity is narrated and recognized. If a fatal encounter occurs with a person of color, the official record often frames the outcome differently than if the person involved is affluent and white. The language in those records can reveal a bias in how the event is described and justified. The speaker notes that the identity carried on a stranger’s face does not align with the legal identity attached to a name, and yet the social world insists on the name to anchor the person in space and time. There is also a curious mystery to the data that binds identity to legality. The official record may not list the person exactly as expected, and in many cases there is no one who matches that name in the documented universe, leaving a sense of ambiguity about who really exists behind the paperwork. The story speaks to the tension between who a person is inside and the labels that surround them outside, a tension that becomes visible in the most ordinary moments of life when a police officer asks for documentation or when one is required to present credentials to navigate daily life. The world, in this telling, is built on the premise that identity is both a personal truth and a public artifact, a blend of memory, law, belief, and the practicalities of daily commerce. The result is a complicated portrait of modern existence, where a person’s face cannot stand alone as proof of who they are, where wealth and status grant additional layers of legitimacy, and where a simple request for papers can reveal the deeper question of what counts as a genuine self in a society that relies on signs and symbols to function.