The currency of identity.

Olga wrote in one of her posts that she’s lived three lives, and it really resonated with me. In a way, I could say I’ve just entered a fourth life. Thinking about it more deeply, though, I’d say I’ve had a different life roughly every seven years, which would make this one my sixth. Mostly because of what shaped my identity and my perception of what matters at each stage.

Being born in Czechoslovakia, my childhood was overshadowed by a lack of belonging. I didn’t like that people mistrusted others – anyone, really, from next-door neighbours to extended family members – which I believe was largely due to the KGB system and the fear that anyone could be a potential spy. When my father moved to Austria after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it suddenly broadened my horizon: there were other ways of living that seemed just as desirable if not more. A memory I cherish from that time is going on a picnic with his Filipino colleagues, where everyone was sharing food and eating with their hands. I obviously wasn’t allowed to do that back home.

Looking back, and after reading more about identity formation, I realise this stage is often described as ancestral identity. The currency of my childhood was belonging: being proud of my family name and enjoying the traditions that were part of the culture I was born into. Only that I wasn’t. 

The next shift came when I moved to Austria at the age of fourteen, where I was able to become – at least as I thought – whoever I wanted to be. 

Looking back, and given I came from a working-class background and had been surrounded by women who were making clothes as a way to become more of who they wanted to be, I grew up believing one could consume their way into an identity and build it around perception. The currency of adolescence was fashion, music taste, and appearance. Only later did I realise that the currency of adulthood is achievement, which then enables access to places, circles, and societies.

At 21, I finally ticked off my first milestone on that ladder and obtained my high school diploma. Since I only started learning German at the age of fourteen, my entire timeline shifted. In an adult sense, I was two years behind and thus rushed through my bachelor’s and master’s degrees to acquire an academic qualification – academic titles turns out are valued much more in Austria than in other countries.

But given my high school diploma was in fashion, I had also realised that our current consumption system is based on exploiting people in other countries far from our reality. It is what makes it possible to sell dresses for 10 Euros while I’d spend days making one. It became increasingly difficult to imagine building a career in an industry whose economics I no longer believed in.

I then moved to England to become an aupair. I wanted to learn English the same way I learned German – by immersing myself in the culture. It was 2007 and Facebook’s adoption in the UK exploded. With it, the badges of status shifted.

Instead of possessions, the places a person could visit and gain access to mattered more than anything. The currency of the social web was no longer ownership but access. I started blogging in 2010 and joined Instagram in 2011. Publishing my observations and opinions and sharing pictures of places I visited opened doors and job opportunities. Within just a few years, I was able to move from Vienna to Utrecht, Salzburg, Berlin, and even spend extended periods in New York, all while working or studying.

The internet had given me access, visibility, and opportunities. What it hadn’t given me was stability.

In 2014, my career plans collapsed. The startup I worked for as a community strategist imploded and I found myself going freelance. I was in a long-distance relationship and didn’t see a full-time commitment working out. To say the least, my decision to go freelance wasn’t an act of bravery. It was a practical assessment of what I thought would work – but I learned that freelancing is not so much a challenge because one has to find clients. It’s much more a challenge because one has to build a persona with a reputation and a brand.

One thing I learned then is that most people build their identities around the careers they are building. They tie their sense of self and value to a corporate identity, a job title, and a salary. As a freelancer, I found myself challenged by the freedom of having to define and redefine who I was and what my value was every single day, especially on the days when I didn’t have any paid projects, no clients knocking on my door, and no sense of being needed by “something larger.”

If the social web rewarded access, freelancing rewarded reputation.

As a reaction, I started writing and publishing books and guides whenever I had nothing else to do. In addition to working for Kickstarter, being a creator gave me a strong sense of self-worth. I visited many places, many countries, spoke at many events, and even gave a TEDx talk.

Yet to be fully honest, as awareness of CO₂ emissions grew, so did my climate anxiety, given I was flying several times a week and intercontinentally every couple of weeks. During many sleepless nights spent wrestling with the cognitive dissonance of calling myself sustainable while flying constantly, my sense of self shifted from the places I could access to the values I wanted to represent.

At that time, the democratic internet was no longer something we had to fight for – it felt like a given. A mission I may have left too early in hindsight, given what AI and Meta’s hunger for money have done to the social web since.

As I was busy acquiring a new citizenship while also redesigning my lifestyle to become more grounded, I not only got a dog but also an interim role as head of marketing at Germany’s biggest vegan food brand. Retrospectively, I see this as a turning point, and the role that landed in my lap became a catalyst for another stage, breaking my usual timeline of roughly seven years.

This new role shifted my perception of what should shape an identity. Achievement and visibility no longer felt sufficient. I had started asking a different question: not what I could accomplish, but what I was contributing to and most of all how.

Joining Veganz wasn’t a conscious decision for its mission. I didn’t apply and go through a standard hiring process. I was recommended as someone who could do the job and solve some of the most pressing challenges, without much questioning of my moral position on food systems.

While I was highly conscious of the benefits of organic food, my understanding of how food is produced was still grounded in how my family treated the topic when I was a child. Interestingly, my childhood in the Czech Republic was the last time my relationship with food went deeper than a quick supermarket visit – which is now somewhere between tomatoes that seem to be always available regardless of season, and butter, cheese, and eggs.

The irony in all this is that my grandparents were mostly self-sufficient, and our family’s nutrition was built around what was available in the garden, stored in the freezer, or pickled and preserved by my grandmother in the pantry, which I now know has little to do with how the West produces food. We only had tomatoes in July, August, and maybe September.

What set this new life phase in motion were the questions and perspectives I was confronted with: the realisation that not only durable goods (which under capitalism have been made increasingly less durable), but also everyday consumables, are built on extractive logic – and that someone always ends up being exploited.

Learning that a cow only gives milk because she is a mother, and that her calf is separated from her so humans can consume that milk, was a truth I could no longer ignore. I may have joined Veganz as a meat eater, but I most certainly left as someone determined to eat plant-based.

I made this decision as someone who had started over several times, someone who had repeatedly defined and redefined identity throughout life. But changing what one eats is fundamental; it requires redesigning rituals and habits. It also comes with the challenge of not just changing clothes, music taste, or job. It means constantly being different from those around you, because there is still no country or city where veganism is the default.

The thing about veganism is that you don’t only become the person who needs “the extra sausage,” as one would say in Austria. You also become hyper-aware of systemic injustice. Suddenly I wasn’t only confronting how European economies exploit less privileged countries, but also how our food system is built on the suffering of others. From there, it snowballed into questioning what banks invest in, what goes into cosmetics, who is prioritised by systems, and who is excluded – and why.

If freelancing rewarded reputation, mission-based identity rewarded moral consistency.

Having lived many lives even before 2018, the question of what is “normal,” who benefits from how systems are designed, and who claims the right to design them becomes unavoidable. Once that question is open, everything is up for discussion, and from there emerges the belief that if everything has been designed, everything can also be redesigned.

That thinking is what led me and my co-founder to start NEW STANDARD.STUDIO in 2020.

The aim was to make the sustainable option the default. Once I started seeing systems as designed rather than inevitable, building a company stopped feeling like entrepreneurship and started feeling like a design challenge.

When we first started in 2020, we relied on a method that had already worked in 2010: we simply blogged our observations and opinions. And because the world had slowed down due to COVID, people listened – and doors began to open.

Having this larger corporate identity umbrella also made it possible to take my husband’s name and set aside my Eastern European immigrant identity for good. Having built an identity around global communities and international travel, starting over under a new name and without the attached baggage of CO₂ emissions felt like a luxury at the time.

Founding that company allowed me to step back from constantly curating my identity and staying visible on my own. Building a company meant inviting others to contribute to a shared identity and operate under a larger umbrella. It made sense to build another entity and let it carry some of the visibility.

At least until I became a mother.

Up until the birth of my first child, my identity had been fully self-directed. One that I had built through work, relationships, creation, and the willingness to lean into uncertainty. My identity became something I could shape independently. For decades I had followed a self-directed path, and even when others tried to put me in a box, it was mostly impossible given the breadth of experiences.

But with motherhood, the currency had changed again. What had once been achievement, access, reputation, and values was now measured against my ability to care for someone else. That much I was able to handle. What I didn’t realise was that becoming a mother would suddenly come with stereotypes, exclusion, and judgement – even from people closest to me.

For years I had been able to redesign myself whenever I wanted.

Motherhood was the first identity shift that arrived whether I wanted it or not.

As I found myself going through sleepless nights, undressing in public to breastfeed whenever my daughter voiced discomfort, and giving my whole self to another human being, the reality – and most of all the stability – I had built began to shatter with the announcement of my second pregnancy and collapsed the moment I gave birth.

As I stood over the remains of what I believed would be my life’s mission for at least another decade, I tried to see it for what it was: another opportunity to start over.

When the reality I had built collapsed in 2025, it became an opportunity to start over again: new city, new country, new language, new social rules, and once again the question of who I want to be in this new phase.

Having started over so many times, I’ve come to believe that identity is much less fixed than we’re taught to think. Looking back, each life was defined less by who I was and more by where I sourced my sense of worth from.

The answer to what makes us valuable changes throughout a life.

Belonging becomes achievement. Achievement becomes access. Access becomes reputation. Reputation becomes values. Values become responsibility for others.

If everything around us has been designed, then everything can be redesigned – including who we become.

Onward.