Are you the same person you used to be? (2022)

I like to think I&#x27;ve been reasonably successful at becoming the person I used to want to be<p>That&#x27;s a very good feeling. Of course not everything in life has played out exactly how I wanted, and there are always regrets about paths not taken<p>But ultimately I had an idea what I wanted from life and I mostly have it now<p>I had to make compromises on a lot of things, but it was worth it to get this far<p>I don&#x27;t live in the city that I wanted to settle down in, but I own my own house where I live now<p>I had to leave family and friends behind in my hometown, but I have met new people and I have a new family where I live now<p>I don&#x27;t work in my dream job, but I have built a solid career<p>I think the past me would be really happy to know what the future held for me, even if it did mean I am not that same person anymore<p>Edit: This is maybe a bit off topic but I think the recent cultural focus on &quot;identity&quot; (as in, &quot;who am I&quot;) has been kind of negative for people<p>What worked really well for me was not getting wrapped up in &quot;who am I&quot; and instead focusing on &quot;who do I want to be&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve seen many friends and acquaintances fall off and become miserable because they got mired in their identity (both sexual and otherwise).<p>Meanwhile I am one of the most successful people I know of from the people I grew up with. Actually, I&#x27;m one of the most successful people in my entire country (top 3% based on income, anyways)<p>Maybe it&#x27;s a privilege to not have to worry about &quot;who am I&quot;, but I really do think &quot;who do I want to be&quot; is just a much better approach. It&#x27;s something you can actually take action to achieve

This passage is from a book I read with my kids, in the &quot;Mysterious Benedict Society&quot; series. I like the way it describes how we become, in a sense, an accumulation of our selves, past and present. I also feel that way about some long-term friendships and other relationships.<p>&gt; &quot;And do you know what Nicholas said? I remember it plainly. He said that he doesn&#x27;t believe that we become different people as we age. No, he says he believes we become _more_ people. We&#x27;re still the kids we were, but we&#x27;re also the people who&#x27;ve lived all the different ages since that time. A whole bunch of different people rolled up into one -- that&#x27;s how Nicholas sees it. And I can&#x27;t say that I disagree. How else to explain that sometimes I want to run and jump the way I used to -- but can&#x27;t anymore -- yet at the same time enjoy sitting with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in a way you couldn&#x27;t have paid me to do as a boy? Well, it&#x27;s a wonder.&quot;<p>Here&#x27;s another way this rings true. When I look at my wife, to whom I&#x27;ve been married for 17 years, I don&#x27;t just see her as she is now. I see her as she has been ever since I&#x27;ve met her. I am married to a 44-year-old and a 24-year-old, and a woman of every age in between.

Emerson may or may not have said “ I cannot remember the books I&#x27;ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”<p>I have a four year as well and we go on grand adventures in the mountains and all over really. I think about this quote and decide that I’m shaping my kids spirit, their courage, their confidence regardless of if they’ll remember it. Beyond that in the present we experience joy and curiosity and laughter and life! It’s silly to lament childhood amnesia because I dont aim to catalog things and check things off a list but experience a fun and interesting life with my family.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;20250423192741&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2022&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;are-you-the-same-person-you-used-to-be-life-is-hard-the-origins-of-you" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;20250423192741&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;...</a>

Actual memories blur together with synthetic memories constructed from old photographs, and stories told by others.<p>These days it&#x27;s really easy to accumulate synthetic memory material in the form of thousands of photos and videos. My kids are covered that way. The hard part is still having access to them a generation later. At least the sparse material from back then survives as fading photographs in a physical album. Not so sure about the flood of material accumulating on people&#x27;s phones these days. Mine lives on reliable backups but I figure once I&#x27;m gone all that digital data will bit rot like everyone else&#x27;s.<p>As for &quot;same person&quot;? Of course not. Both body and mind change over time as you accumulate life experiences, both good and bad. It&#x27;s a continuum of change. I&#x27;d have quite a bit of stuff to tell my 30 year ago self. Don&#x27;t know if he would listen.

Loosely related talk from Hank Green a number of years ago whose thesis is basically that you don&#x27;t owe your past self&#x27;s dreams anything. It&#x27;s kind of hard to summarize further, but I really like it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lPtopvsxmZY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lPtopvsxmZY</a> (the main part starts about 5 minutes in, some salty text)

There is a surprising amount of detailed childhood memories you may be able to retrieve by making a prolonged, conscious effort. I would guess that many people who say they don&#x27;t have very many childhood memories have never taken e.g. 30 minutes of concentrated effort to really try to retrieve them. Here&#x27;s what worked for me: imagine my childhood apartment, and mentally move along it, very very slowly, stopping in every part of every room, mentally examining every piece of furniture, etc. Of course it won&#x27;t work for everyone, but for me memories associated with specific places just flooded in, I was very surprised at how many there were. I&#x27;m sure there are other methods as well. I think basically it involves trying a bunch of different &quot;keys&quot; that may be a match to &quot;values&quot; stored in memory.

I&#x27;m not even sure what the concept of &quot;person&quot; means anymore. Am I in the same body? Not really, most cells have been replaced by newer ones. Am I taking relatively the same volume and shape in space? Yes, my body, despite all the new cells, still looks more-or-less the same (bar the gray hair and other changes). Am I the same &quot;I&quot; and &quot;me&quot; I used to call myself? I don&#x27;t even know if my memories are completely accurate to see if how I thought of myself in the past is the same as now. And I&#x27;ve been wondering who&#x27;s the person that says&#x2F;thinks these things (like in this comment) for over a decade now...<p>I might be just a super advanced neural net (like a language model) with self-reflection and so many self-doubts.

It is weird, but I distinctly remember when I lost the unconditional happiness I had since I was a child. It never came back and I miss it. It is not like I am not happy, it is just that it depends on many factors.

Of course not. Why would I want to be? I didn&#x27;t know then what I know now.

&quot;im more like i am today than i was&quot; - my grandpa, to everyone, every time hes asked how he is, forever

I have noticed that my life circumstances reliably change, every five years, in ways I could never have predicted. A bias toward seeking change is certainly a factor.<p>But I still recognize very strong continuity in interests, values and ways of thinking from when I was just two years old. There are themes in me that are ridiculously stable. At two I had a really strong sense of myself.<p>And while the things most important to me have adapted, they have done so in a sense of upping my game in a broader world. They are more consistent with my tiny self, than if I had just kept my views &amp; values despite awareness of other horizons.<p>But I am also deeper in ways that my early self didn’t portend at all. Almost always as a result of going through hard times. Almost all those changes, despite the pain they cost, are very welcome.<p>In that way, I have certainly changed, or taken branches, that were entirely independent of my early self.<p>Enough that presumably, there are many superpositions of me, that have gone through different experiences, and are now quite different from this version of me.

I am a self reassembling aboriginal scavenger robot sent back through time to stop a catastrophic event that already happened.<p>Our main fabrication issue is that we can only put ourselves back together after the disaster already happened.<p>It&#x27;s quite simple. It also evades much of the psychology bullshit usually associated with this sort of inquiry.

Discussed a bit at the time (I think):<p><i>Are you the same person you used to be as a child?</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33828278">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33828278</a> - Dec 2022 (6 comments)

I am not the same person as I was yesterday! I have wild swings of personality!

Heraclitus summarized it 25 centuries ago: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it&#x27;s not the same river and he&#x27;s not the same man.”

No, took the wrong drug. Entered psychosis, saw myself of who I was to be in a mirror. Family pulled me out of the psychosis and I swore to never be that person. 10 years later, I have my own apartment, have stability and more of a solid personality.<p>It hurts to change oneself but so glad I am not in the place I was before.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;tlRGI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;tlRGI</a>

Just answering the title: God, no. And current me looks back at previous me with _very_ mixed feelings.

It paints a picture of us constantly reshaping our identities, but how much of that is truly up to us? I feel like our choices are shaped by things like family, upbringing, or biology, are we really free to evolve, or are we just rolling with a preset script?

A context shift always changes things. At my core, I’m pretty similar to the person I was when I was very young.<p>I was always looking for love and romance. It escaped me all my life and still does. So, in some sense, I’ve never changed and my context hasn’t either.

I don’t see same being good or bad and it could be one of them depending on who you were.

Just anedata, but the earliest memory I can recall is from when I was 3, by the time my brother was born. But it&#x27;s too fragmentary. From 6-8 onwards I can recall much better what was like being me by then.

Can’t read beyond the paywall but right of the bat it starts with the (to me) mistaken claim that one needs memories of something to have that something shape your character. Why do people believe this?

Silly article but, I really miss having the slow news days that made them so common.

No, but I am certainly a <i>product</i> of all the people that I used to be.

I&#x27;m closer to remembering who I am than ever before, does that count?

We are all katamari -<p>messily rolling along,<p>sticking parts of our experiences to our selves.<p>Growing ever larger<p>around an unchanging core

&gt; The question of our continuity has an empirical side that can be answered scientifically.<p>Wait, what? Doesn&#x27;t the Ship of Thesseus apply to our character just as much as to our body? And if so, doesn&#x27;t that make it a <i>philosophical</i> question, and absolutely <i>not</i> scientific, as character is immaterial?

Anytime I think of myself 5 years ago, I always think that I used to be an imbecile. And that is a good thing, because otherwise the logical conclusion would be that I am still one.<p>Or, as someone much smarter than me once said, <i>&quot;When I think of all I have said, I envy the mute&quot;</i>.

I find it funny that this has a paywall for the article, but on the same webpage it offers thevfull audio. I guess I am the same kid as before, trying to find loopholes.

I had very risky heart surgery at 3 as a result my memories kick in very early and the stress response meant I developed very early as well, I was doing mental math at least a grade before any other kids in pre-school when we&#x27;d play around the world, etc. they thought I was magic and my teacher very wisely gave us a problem with larger numbers so that I couldn&#x27;t mentally follow the problem and I had to resort to finger counting as a placeholder for larger numbers my close friend who couldn&#x27;t do mental math yet arrived at the answer sooner because his finger game was stronger.<p>At the time, based on my heart defect I wasn&#x27;t expected to live a full length of life (verdicts still out on that one)<p>By 15 I was working full time in tech.<p>Married to a 25 year old at 18, imminent death and religious upbringing tends to rush things that shouldn&#x27;t be, I knew myself but I didn&#x27;t understand her, I didn&#x27;t understand attachment theory or that my secure attachment style wasn&#x27;t the only kind and that a person could marry someone for all kinds of bad faith reasons, in her words later &quot;just wasn&#x27;t really attached to&quot;.<p>My parents early deaths bookended my twenties.<p>One thing I&#x27;ve always observed is that I seem to have a very small identity surface area compared to others, more of an identity based on refining my heuristic than any one activity. The identity of exploration and wonder, maybe because that&#x27;s how children are since everything is so new, maybe my early cognitive awareness locked in that child like trait.<p>I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve changed at all since I was three except for better executive function and emotional control, more patient, less angry, but the project and it&#x27;s purposes, the knowledge base has increased, the functionality has changed, priors have been tweaked in an append only kind of way, and so I can still rewind to prior states and think in the ways I used to, but so many of the things I believed to be true ended up being clearly false on further examination.<p>Sonder was an early expierence for me, knowing I wouldn&#x27;t be here long and seeing old men walking across a cross walk knowing that their path would continue long after mine was over.<p>I think if you have sufficient wonder and empathy you can stay connected to all your past states but the less empathy and connection you have I imagine you&#x27;d eventually feel disconnected from your past self.<p>I think continuity of self is very heavily tied to how early you start meta cognating and how much cognitive empathy you are capable of, I notice that many people change their mind on an issue and seem to forget they held a prior contrary position previously, but I cherish the uninformed and unexamined beliefs I&#x27;ve had corrected.<p>I&#x27;m the same person I always was, which at core isn&#x27;t much, but I&#x27;m really glad I still love and have compassion for all the states I&#x27;ve been throughout life.

If your family put good values into you, then hopefully you as an adult are a reasonable evolution from the child version of you - you are manifesting those values in your own ways, appropriate to your environment.<p>I recently was at a Gala for a Rabbi, who wasn&#x27;t born religious. His secular parents were there, and he thanked them for teaching him to always seek truth and to priories that pursuit. The pursuit itself took him to a different area (they are secular, he found truth in Judaism) but he was still operating on their parameters, just took them to a logical conclusion for himself.<p>Similarly, I think a 5 year old version of myself would not be too disappointed with the 44 year old version of myself, because to a large extent I then and now share my family&#x27;s core values.<p>At the same time, you evolve in response to where you are. So for example I always knew I wanted a family, but I had to &quot;grow up&#x2F;evolve&quot; to be someone that my someone like my wife would marry, and evolve again was we had 1, 2, and now 3 kids. Am I a different person as a father than as a single guy in NYC? Yeah. Is it a natural evolution - perhaps a richer manifestation what was always potential? Doubly yeah.<p>The other thing is - we have a lot more room to evolve aspects of ourselves, even as adults. For example I&#x27;ve personally always been very upfront, very intense, very intolerant of fuckups. All these things have ameliorated as I became a father - not because I betrayed some aspect of my personality, but because underlying that intensity was a deep care about the outcome, and with little kids, something different is required to attain the outcomes.<p>So things you think are &quot;you&quot; - you zoom out and just see as tools, and then realize that other tools are more appropriate to pursue your actual values.<p>Analogously from fatherhood, being a leader of larger and larger organizations has similar effect. The deep intrinsic set of abilities and behaviors that made me a rockstar engineer IC, is not the same as what makes me successful as a product leader. So as I step into these different roles, I have to figure out what&#x27;s not working - and to figure out if that&#x27;s really &quot;intrinsic parts of me&quot; that are in the way, or is there a perspective that lets me change those things while remaining true to myself.<p>So again thinking back to my 5 year old self, did I have what it takes to be a good father&#x2F;leader? Obviously not. But I had some value of &quot;not sucking at those things when I become them, and evolving in response&quot; somewhere in there. So when I encountered those things, it wasn&#x27;t a betrayal of self to evolve.<p>My oldest kid is almost 5, and I am realizing how much you get to shape some of their values&#x2F;ideas. For example if I don&#x27;t let them watch TV&#x2F;videos, I always say &quot;it&#x27;s because this stuff doesn&#x27;t make you smarter. But we watch certain things because they do make you smarter.&quot; It&#x27;s less to win an argument about a particular TV moment but more to create a life long memory &quot;dad always cared that we did things that made us smarter&quot; kind of thing. I am sure my kids will end up in plenty situations I can&#x27;t possibly anticipate but there&#x27;s hope that &quot;which one will make me smarter&quot; is one lens they&#x27;ll use to decide in their own evolution.

No, thank ...

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...</a><p>&quot;Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word <i>no</i>.&quot;