to be or not to be

i went on a random walk and stumbled on this question: matt, what would you like to be? the internal monologue went as follows:

in order to determine what you want to be, you must first establish what to be actually means. i began by juxtaposing to be with to be perceived as. i then began to explore other languages, all latin based because thats the extent of my knowledge of language and (with the later help of kiersten) i broke down to be into 4 seperate components. 4 bes in their own right.

to be composed of
to be in terms of action
to exist
to be perceived as

the first is where my question began to focus, but i will first go over the others so as to avoid misinterpreting the first.

to be interms of action fits rather well into the spanish estar. i can say for instance, i am running or i am sick. these can all be observed by an outsider and do not apply to what i am or would like to be.

to be perceived as is fairly simple. adjectives, all that i can think of, apply to this. nouns, too, i guess. i want to be perceived as a nice guy. i want to be perceived as cool. this focuses almost solely on others and also deals with aspirations to a certain extent.

existing is a more scientific being. the best example to use for why this deserves a seperate being starts to get into the question of the first being that i asked of myself. if there is a man in a black box, isolated from everything (namely a society in any sense) it is not a stretch to say that at some point he will experience hunger, a physical need. through this hunger we assume that the man is aware of the concept of i, that he must exist because he can recognise his own needs.

i originally thought this might bring me closer to an answer as to what i wanted or could want to be. but on further inspection, that existence is completely different. it establishes, but does not define the concept of i. We know there is an i; we want to find its composition to establish some sort of precedent on deciding what an i can be.

break it down into the simplest sentence: i am. the am defines the i, the am is what (insert pronoun) need.

ill give some examples i went through after these discussions. i started by prioritizing describing words- adjectives. i began by thinking perhaps i wanted to be intelligent, but this begins to interfere with definition 4. i did not want to be intelligent for its own sake, but for the sake of helping a society or establishing myself as superior to those within it. the next word i tried was spiritual, but again, i found that in my least spiritual times i was least inhibited, least worried, and most happy. (i know the same may not be true for you, but if it is true for me, it cannot be something that applies to the broadest sense of a definition). this led me to ask myself whether being happy or peaceful or calm characterized an actual composition, but the problem arises again. can this nonphysical i be defined simply by emotions and desires or doesnt the nature of those things depending on outside forces negate the idea that we are defining an i in a way that is not acted upon by outside forces.

that clearly defines in my mind a couple of things id like to reiterate.

1. there is an i.
2. there is a physical i that can be observed through self-perception
3. self-perception is perception and fits into definition four
4. composition cannot be a function/ there cannot be a society or any outside force at play when defining the composition of i in the first definition of to be.
5. the composition of i is the actual "being" in i am.

heres where i hit the wall on my search, because i took away what i thought was a given: the physical i. after death, is there a nonphysical (metaphysical/existential) i? there is no way for us to observe that.