you're the system
Do you remember the Chinese room argument? Here's a refresher, per SEP:
Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he sends appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room.
The narrow conclusion Searle draws from the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but could not produce real understanding.
One common response to this is "Neither Searle nor the computer understands Chinese, but the Searle-computer system does."
Relatedly, a popular theory of mind is to think of yourself as an elephant and a rider, from Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis. I'm going to steal from Cate Hall's recent post on burnout to describe it here:
One of my favorite lenses for thinking about motivation is the “elephant and rider” framework developed by Jonathan Haidt. The elephant is the part of us that is instinctive and emotional. It lurches powerfully in the direction of everything that makes life pleasant — novelty, belonging, calories, pleasure. The elephant controls what we crave, what we fear, what we find ourselves doing without effort.
Meanwhile, the rider is the rational voice that engages in long-term planning and explains our behavior to others; it thinks in “shoulds” and “oughts.” It’s the part that’s responsible for restraint, the part that makes what we think of as “conscious choices,” and the part that offers rational justifications for our behavior when we’re questioned (whether or not the behavior is rational at all). Sometimes, the rider is our PR department.
I'm uncertain how reality-reflecting this dichotomy is, but everyone has their own words for it, ranging from System 1 and System 2 to the Rational Decision-Maker and the Instant-Gratification Monkey.
If you live life in your head—that is, your mode of experience is "behind your eyeballs," and your thoughts are made of language—I think it's tempting to see yourself as the rider, and the elephant as sort of this unnecessary evolutionary baggage, a vestigial organ. The western media diet makes it incredibly easy to fall into "conquer your desires and win the war within"-style thinking.
If that's you, consider: you are not the rider. You are the elephant-rider system.