Something I keep coming back to: my notion of self changes over both space and time.
Space first. As we travel, live in different places, and meet people, we have experiences we wouldn't otherwise have had. Those experiences change us. What feels normal, what we want, what we think is possible.
I wonder how much of what I call “my personality” is tied to the places and people around me. Put me somewhere else for long enough and some of it would probably look different.
Then there's time. Even if I stay in one place, I'm still having experiences, learning things, changing my mind. The person I was ten years ago didn't have any of the context I've picked up since.
Here's the part I find interesting: I can relate more to a stranger who has had roughly similar life experiences to mine than to myself ten years ago.
The stranger might understand a decision I'm making now more easily than my younger self would. We don't share a history, but we may have arrived at a similar way of seeing things.
A few takeaways for me:
- Being the same person over time doesn't mean feeling close to every past version of myself.
- Shared experience seems to matter a lot for connection, even between people who have just met.
- My younger self was working with different information. It's worth remembering that before judging old decisions.
Still thinking about this. If someone else can feel more familiar than an earlier version of me, what exactly am I referring to when I say “me”?