Self-interpretation of existence is made difficult, moreover, because being in the world always also entails being with others.

Heidegger maintains that the self-interpretation of existence is made difficult, moreover, because being in the world always also entails being with others. In this, Heidegger argues that in the averageness of everyday existence, we tend to interpret ourselves not by what differentiates us from others, but, instead, by what can be attributed indifferently to anyone. 

Such interpretations may be attractive because accessible to anyone, but they come at the price of being distorting and reductive. In the averageness of everyday existence, the sense of self that comes into focus through self-interpretation is not a self in its singular possibilities to be.

 It is rather a sense of self characterized by circumscribed possibilities, which, for Heidegger, finds expression in the pronoun ‘they,’ or ‘one’ (das Man)—so that we interpret our own possibilities restrictively in terms of what ‘one’ thinks, what ‘one’ does, and no more (see Heidegger Being and Time, § 27; see also Heidegger, Ontology, § 6).