To be defined from within means that the man’s sense of what he is does not depend on the mirrors held up by the surrounding culture. Those mirrors are numerous and insistent. They reflect him as a consumer, as a voter, as a unit of labor, as a member of this or that temporary identity. Each reflection seeks to become the primary one. The differentiated type rejects the claim. His primary definition comes from the higher principle he has chosen to serve.
This does not produce a fantasy self. The man still occupies concrete roles. He still faces concrete limits of strength, intelligence, and circumstance. What changes is the meaning assigned to those roles and limits. A low position in the outer hierarchy does not equate to a low rank in the order that matters to him. A high position does not automatically confer the quality he seeks. The interior definition keeps both possibilities in their place.
The age makes this stance difficult by flooding the field of attention with external metrics. Numbers of followers, income, visibility, the approval of peers — all of these are presented as the real measures. The young man who begins to orient himself differently will feel the pull of those metrics as a kind of gravity. The work is to keep returning to the interior definition until the gravity weakens. That return is daily and often invisible.
When a man is truly defined from within, the judgments of the age lose their sting without losing their practical relevance. He can still act effectively in the world. He simply no longer confuses the world’s evaluation of him with the evaluation that counts. This is the near completion of the differentiated stance. The final day of the phase will gather what has been required.