I don’t know how to express or articulate my thoughts and my vocabulary and grammar gets messed up the more I write so I will just write simply.
What I’m trying to say is that every day or hour or minute or everytime you think, you feels like your original selves is dying. I know that we are constantly growing but i just can’t stop thinking that whenever we grow or learning new things or start to think differently, our past selves is dead. I think back to my past selves in middle school, highschool and from 2022 and think, aren’t they dead? No matter what i do or think or whatever happens to me, i can’t bring back the personalities or "me"s from the past. They remain dead and continue to being dead. Unless they are exist in another timeline or universe.
What exactly is identity, consciousness or the self which is me? I don’t know nor understand but this idea just stuck in my mind and occasionally appears when I’m bored, stressed or relaxed.
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Thanks for your consideration. I’ll keep that in mind.
Listen if past me couldn’t keep up that’s on them.
We’re all probably better for it.
I’m way cooler than that guy.
Your past selves aren’t dead. You just evolved into what you are now. That’s what we do.
What do you mean by “evolve”? I think my past selves is dead because I can’t experience the exact same consciousness of the past selves of me again. Doesn’t that count as being “dead”?
“Is the caterpillar dead because it became a butterfly?”
The caterpillar IS the butterfly. Perhaps not as you know it, but change is the universal constant, my friend, and trying to hold on to the past is a futile attempt.
In my experience it’s best to acknowledge the past enough so we can appreciate the good things, learn from our mistakes or anything we feel we did less-than-great at, then try to do better as we evolve.
No, you’re not the exact same person you were a few years ago, but we live in a changing world and we change with it as time goes on.
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”
Best of luck, I’m here if you want to talk about anything :)
I don’t think you quite understand what I’m trying to say.
“Is the caterpillar dead because it became a butterfly?”
The caterpillar IS the butterfly. Perhaps not as you know it, but change is the universal constant,
How is this relevant? I’m talking from the first person perspective. Whether the caterpillar is dead or not depends on the person experiencing the consciousness of their own mind. From my perspectives, i think yes, the caterpillar is dead (it’s not really important because the caterpillar or butterfly isn’t conscious of itself).
By that rationale, wouldn’t other people then also be dead, as you cannot experience their consciousness?
I’m not trying to dehumanize other people but yes. That’s how i see it.
It’s a very intersting viewpoint, pardon me for exploring further. So future you (or me) is also dead until the brief flash of life where yours and his consciousness finally overlap, before lapsing into nothingness again.
It’s very reasonable even, to think everything not experienced this very moment is totally alien to us.
Thanks for stretching my grey matter on this dull day!
You’ve probably hit upon a good metaphor for what’s happening.
I believe each time we sleep parts of our personalities are torn down and rebuilt slightly differently.
Whatever the mechanism, you aren’t really the same person you were years ago, you’re a different person with many of the same memories. The “self” is a useful simplification of reality. At the fundamental level, its not possible to define “you” and “not you” at a moment in time, much less across spans of time.And they aren’t even the same memories. “You” just thinks they are, but every time “you” remembers them they’re slightly different because you don’t remember the facts of the memory only whats important to “you” and “you” is constantly changing.
If therapy has taught us anything, it’s that we can also change and direct that change while conscious. So past you is probably slightly different than now you for any value of past and now.
Now, the only reason I see to feel bad about that is if you leave a worse person in charge than was there before. Focus on self-improvement, and improvement of the world around you, and maybe the end of past you isn’t so bad a thing.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, nothing really matters, on a universal scale. We’ll be extinct as a species in a million years, probably much less. Our solar system will be nebula after our sun explodes in less than 5 billion. There will be no trace we ever existed.
Just try to hurt as few people as little as possible, and be kind to as many as possible. Leave the place better than you found it. That’s all you can do. Or don’t, it’s up to you.
Yes, often.
We as thinking beings consider ourselves to be constant. The trail of memories leading from our childhoods to today make it feel as though we are still that person who lived through all of those times, but we aren’t. We can’t be.
I have memories belonging to an 8 year old boy in my mind, he had the same name I did and lived with parents who also had the same name as mine, but I am a much older person - older than his parents, even - and I share almost no common ground with this boy. How can we be the same person, when we are so obviously different?
I am physically a different person to this person of my memories, and I can’t be sure he exists or existed. He may simply be a figment of my imagination, a story I tell myself of where I have come from but made up from whole cloth.
I think of a tree. It’s a tiny little sprout that grows into a sapling that grows into a young tree that grows into a regular tree that grows into a giant.
Yet when I think back to the sprout or the sapling, I don’t think of someone that’s gone. I get like a cartoon image of the big tree, with the little tree still fully formed inside it, like the big tree has made a cave that shelters the smaller tree. The smaller tree is still there in all it’s form, it’s just safe and sheltered and a bit harder to see.
This is a great analogy. If you were to look inside the tree, you’d see the rings that show the progress of how it had grown. Those earlier versions aren’t there in the same sense, but they are still there in a very real way.
Buddhism has some interesting takes on this. In particular, I really enjoyed The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, written by Sogyal Rinpoche.
Good, I hate those past me’s
Not a fan of the current guy either
Yes. I think you might like this article and other musings of this guy https://robertsaltzman.substack.com/p/im-a-different-person-now
Nothing is dead. The past, present and future exist in harmony together. Yesterday is still there, and so is yesteryear. We can’t reach it anymore, but it’s still there.
I have their memories, so how can they be dead? Personalities change over time, so it’s only natural to see your past self differently.
Alternatively, your past selves are immortal. They can’t be harmed. Nothing that didn’t happen to them can ever happen to them.
I went through a period of this when I was younger. I did not find a satisfactory way of dealing with those thoughts, but they did eventually recede.
There’s quite a bit of philosophy out there abut this. It might help to read about it. Some physics topics are related, like the Planck scale. If you want to read about what others have thought on the topic, here’s a starting point.
So: yes, you’re not alone.
