We can’t see inside the croquembouche because it’s closed off, so we can’t know what’s in there. It’s like how we can’t see what’s inside ourselves without opening ourselves up. We can see ourselves by projecting ourselves onto objects around us, in our idea of them, our personality, our consciousness. Personal identity becomes sacred to us because it’s how we know to understand.

In the same way that we build our own personalities, we build our own memories and histories. The walls between us protect our subjective interpretations of the world. Beholden to subjectivity, we are obsessed with knowing a single, real truth and proving that our memories and identities are real, that our histories really happened. We use technology to do this. But we can’t externalize the functions of our brains. So we create stylized, personalized outer shells and decorate them and distract ourselves with them.

We change our identity depending on circumstances, so identity is not objectively true. Not the way birth and death are true. Only in making and breaking the croquembouche do we see the inside of it. Coming together in a group to celebrate taking it apart is a proxy for devouring ourselves, with our own projections existing as part of the croquembouche, and discovering our own meaning by dismantling the self, attaining the relief of destroying ourselves.