That'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
But ultimately I had an idea what I wanted from life and I mostly have it now
I had to make compromises on a lot of things, but it was worth it to get this far
I don't live in the city that I wanted to settle down in, but I own my own house where I live now
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
I don't work in my dream job, but I have built a solid career
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
Edit: This is maybe a bit off topic but I think the recent cultural focus on "identity" (as in, "who am I") has been kind of negative for people
What worked really well for me was not getting wrapped up in "who am I" and instead focusing on "who do I want to be"
I've seen many friends and acquaintances fall off and become miserable because they got mired in their identity (both sexual and otherwise).
Meanwhile I am one of the most successful people I know of from the people I grew up with. Actually, I'm one of the most successful people in my entire country (top 3% based on income, anyways)
Maybe it's a privilege to not have to worry about "who am I", but I really do think "who do I want to be" is just a much better approach. It's something you can actually take action to achieve
But when I was a bit older I knew "I want to do something with computers", because my family had a windows 3.1 computer and I liked to play games on it. Of course at the time I had no idea what anyone even did with computers. I also had no idea that in the future every single job that exists would be "something to do with computers"
I started taking computer classes in high school which got me into programming, because I wanted to make games. This is a pretty common pipeline for Millennial programmers I think
After that I went to a local university and took Computer Science. Luckily I was just dumb enough to stick with it the whole time and get a bachelors. I say dumb enough somewhat ironically. Obviously doing a BSc in Compsci takes a bit of smarts, but I had friends who became convinced they were too smart to bother with a degree, and all of them who dropped out to pursue their own path without the degree are much worse off than I am now
Anyways, after my degree I no longer wanted to work in games. I wanted to work in embedded systems. Turns out there weren't many opportunities to work in embedded systems in my local market so I got into web dev. Like I said, not my dream job, but I'm very good at it and it has been a really successful career.
So I guess to summarize:
Yes I was pretty lucky to somewhat choose a direction when I was young, even if I didn't know more than "work with computers".
However the dream path still wasn't exactly a straightforward arrow from Ninja Turtle to Web Dev. At every single step it felt like I was compromising on my dreams.
Turns out that compromise can be really good though
I didn't grow up to be a Ninja Turtle
Although I may have to make a point of this sometime now, just for kicks
Carl Jung investigated this with his "puer-aeternus" (the child that was promised) and "senex" (old man) archetypes. A really interesting read, if you have time for that. In essence I think he advocated a balance, where one starts at childhood, becomes a cynical grown-up and then re-integrates his childhood fantasies back into his character, but now in a less naive and wiser way.
That's cultural bias right there. It happens only if you tell them to dream impossible big things. If you don't teach children that astronauts exist, they will likely dream to become their teacher or the janitor at school, especially the friendly, nice ones.
I now have red sport-touring bike and a beautiful wife so, mission accomplished?
I was bullied relentlessly in elementary school, I got into fistfights constantly
My family didn't have a ton of money, we were very blue collar. My dad worked his way up to manager at a tool store. I am not some guy who went to an ivy league. I took student loans just to attend a local community college because I could not afford to relocate to a good university even though I had the grades. I just didn't have scholarship tier grades. I wasn't getting a free ride anywhere
I had some privileges, for sure. Having a loving family that supported me is a big one. Having the intelligence and just enough work ethic to be successful in school.
But man, I worked evenings in fast food jobs during high school to afford a car because my family absolutely could not afford to buy me even a clunker
Edit: And I needed this car desperately, because there was no nearby transit I could use to eventually get to college, nevermind getting to other, slightly better part time jobs
Like there's privilege, I acknowledge but maybe dial it back from "extreme privilege"?
Not to minimize but most of your adversity is "normal" almost everyone has had these struggles and they are also easily paved over with money. Also telling how it is all past tense. you described a normal "middle class " childhood through the economic collapse of the 2000s.
I can see why you would get that impression, but what do you want from me here? From my perspective I have worked very hard to get to this place
For context, I started out 15ish years ago making ~28k USD/year as a junior software dev. I suspect this is pretty low for most people on this forum, even as a junior?
Now I make ~98k USD as a senior software dev, 15 years later. I suspect that is much lower than "top 3% of earners in Canada" sounded like? Edit: For context this would 'only' put me in the top 13% of American earners. I suspect many people on this forum do much better than I do, and the top 3% of American earners make my income look like a joke
I don't think I fit the archetype of "rich guy posting online" that you have projected on me. I do really well for myself yes, within my country and within my context, but I'm not exactly the Bezos of Canada.
> most people concerned with identity because it's an everyday struggle to make identity fit reality and most people have way too much to lose to risk rocking the boat
It is way harder to make reality fit your identity than it is to modify your identity to fit reality
> Also telling how it is all past tense. you described a normal "middle class " childhood through the economic collapse of the 2000s
By strict definition it was lower class, not middle class. But yes, lower class in the 90s and 00s was much more comfortable than it is today, you're right about that
Completely separate from the 90s boom.
Again not to be rude but you very much ARE a rich guy posting online with rather decadent privilege going off how it's just people being fed "identity nonsense" is harmful to them.
It's is another common rich guy defense mechanism to say well since I'm not bezos himself it's fine! That doesn't really assuage my point at all.
Never projected any solid path, took every day as it went and just (rather well) recognized those crucial moments in life where choices are made that massively affect rest of the life. What to study, how hard to study, where to move (or not) after university, partners, if and which job to change, if and where to move further etc. But it was always just focus on now and maybe next step at most.
Anyway the path I ended up taking I wouldn't make up even in my wildest dreams. Surpassed expectations massively of all folks that knew me, be it peers or family. And overall it wasn't hard at all for me, but for others who would like to jump to last (most successful) moves it would be, since they didn't go through all those steps I did before.
Moved between 3 countries within Europe (nobody from my peers did that, max 1 and settle - nothing special on its own, but I came from very settle-asap environment). Increased my salary of Java dev cca 30-40x compared to first full time job with cca same role, ending up in maybe top 0.1% within Europe (I know, not SV, but still), while still just 100% employed (actually 90% now with 50 paid vacation days, what a deal). Living in more beautiful place than I imagined existed, in society I am proud to be part of that never ceases to amaze me (Switzerland). Backpacked the world in remote 3rd countries when most folks I know went for sunbathing at nearest beach. Picked up passions that nobody I knew back home did like climbing, alpinism, diving, ski touring, paragliding and so on.
Started very low, so far ended rather high. But it can all easily come crashing down like house of cards, well aware of that. Had a big paragliding accident last year, both legs broken, still some consequences. Good for yet another perspective alignment. Have properly wonderful small kids, thats main focus now. With kids, they take over life so effectively I don't have time nor even will for such questions. So focusing on now, and maybe next (small, not physical rather financial) move.
Am I person I used to be? Hell no I am completely different person, from core up to the rest, better, more resilient and tolerant, vastly more knowledgeable about people and world, yet always learning (ie this site is amazing for that, there is no topic not worthy learning)
My knee jerk reaction to this was "how can anyone be anything but 'just who they are'". I think I get what you mean though. Many people dream much bigger than what they are actually capable of accomplishing. Maybe that was my real advantage. I've always been pretty grounded, and I've never really dreamed bigger than I could accomplish.
It may be that by not dreaming big I'm not reaching the absolute fullest potential I could, but it also means I accomplish many of the things I set out to do which is also a good feeling
I'm a firm believer in building strong foundations before reaching for the stars, and I guess my path somewhat embodies that
> I guess most people think of who they want to become personality-wise but maybe it's just me
Again I sort of think a lot of this boils down to people not having a good sense of their own capabilities. If your goals and your capabilities aren't aligned, you're very likely to crash out imo
If I read you correctly (from your workmanlike if somewhat stilted English) as German, I grossed last year a bit over 2x, just in cash comp, than that "top 3%" you're bragging about.
I kept a hell of a lot more of it, too. That's because my tax regime advantages winners and yours advantages losers. That's okay; losers need to live, and I don't take what would be the significant deductions on my charitable donations in any case, just my first time homebuyer's and honest credits like that.
Then I quit that job in November, because life's too short and what the hell could I still have to prove? I'll probably start looking late Q2, or maybe Q1 '26, who knows. I'll need to do something to support the tertiary education I intend finally here in my mid-forties to go back and get, after all.
You obviously think a great deal of yourself. That's fine. You should learn to keep a handle on it, though. You can open your mouth so wide you get your feet stuck in it, that way.
OP is commenting on the process of becoming-who-you-want-to-be. They feel they’ve succeeded. I get that this may come off as self-congratulatory, but what’s the alternative? Stay silent? Lie and say they aren’t who they wanted to be? They seem adequately humble to me, I don’t understand the hostility
I have felt the same.
> I don’t understand the hostility
In English we have the saying, "to speak to someone like a Dutch uncle." There is no hostility in the absence of coddling, and I have been nearly homeless and nearly dead in consequence of assumptions strongly resembling those I see and criticize.
I have recovered and am well. My concern is that my interlocutor, I hope, be warned against what I strongly believe I recognize, as very much akin to what was once my own hubris.
I have been actually homeless
> I have recovered and am well.
Very glad to hear that. Same here
> I strongly believe I recognize, as very much akin to what was once my own hubris
Makes sense why you reacted the way you did then. Sounds like I hit close to home.
I'm glad to hear we both can say we've overcome it. Keep on not fuckin' up.
Do we? What does it mean?
This is actually one of a small class of now somewhat archaic English epithets. I believe the most common survivor is "going Dutch" or "Dutch treat," which was current if slightly oldfashioned as recently as my now three decades gone childhood. That refers to a date or other group event wherein everyone pays their own way, with the heavy implication that whoever made such an invitation (or surprised their party with the news!) is a cheapskate jerk for not at least offering pro forma also to cover the tab.
None of these 'Dutch' expressions ("Dutch courage," for alcohol, is another I've seen in live use) is complimentary in original intent, because they date from some dreary war or other in the 1600s that I believe the English lost. More at Wiktionary and, from there, Wikipedia: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dutch_uncle
Native English speaker from Canada, actually. My grandfather was from Germany though, so good guess sort of?
Anyways, I'm just going to re-organize some of your sentences and suggest you invest in a mirror to take a long and hard look into
> You obviously think a great deal of yourself
> I grossed last year a bit over 2x, just in cash comp, than that "top 3%" you're bragging about
> That's because my tax regime advantages winners and yours advantages losers. That's okay; losers need to live
> You should learn to keep a handle on it, though. You can open your mouth so wide you get your feet stuck in it, that way.
You should take your own advice, bud
Of course those numbers are as bullshit as the first set since we would need to convert and compute tax on the gross and I'm not digging up brackets from four years ago. Still.
> I grossed last year a bit over 2x, just in cash comp, than that "top 3%" you're bragging about
You accuse me of bragging, while you are bragging about making double what I make
> That's because my tax regime advantages winners and yours advantages losers. That's okay; losers need to live
You accuse me of hubris when you call other people losers
> You should learn to keep a handle on it, though. You can open your mouth so wide you get your feet stuck in it, that way.
You're the one putting their foot in their mouth
> You obviously think a great deal of yourself
Every flaw you are accusing me of, you have demonstrated in the very same post where you made the accusation
Like I said. You should invest in a mirror and take a good hard look into it
I did.
Why do you think I told you I quit?
not have to worry about "who am I", but I really do think "who do I want to be" is just a much better approach
> many become miserable because they got mired in their identity sexual and otherwise
I think one factor is that we're always looking for a balance between doing what we want and doing what's right. When they're not the same in someone's conscience, they look for external approval that what they want isn't wrong or bad or harmful, so they can keep doing it. Especially sexually.
There's also virtue signalling as a way to get social credit, which is also usually geared towards getting something that you want, but with it either being not justified or not earned.
Or, as someone much smarter than me once said, "When I think of all I have said, I envy the mute".
When I regret saying something, it's almost always something mean.
5 years ago I thought I was an imbecile, but now I know it for a fact that I am :)
No for real though. It's a cliche but 5-10 years ago I actually thought I knew everything, now I know just how much I don't know
These days, I know less than ever!
I still can be but at some point I recognized that my personality and behavior was driving people away from me and also it made me miserable to be that way. I made a conscious effort to change
Actually, this is somewhat also related to the idea I posted elsewhere in this thread, about being inputs into our own system.
When I wanted to stop being so miserable to be around, I set a goal for myself: "I am going to try to make at least one person smile every day"
I don't think I managed to every day, but it made me take note when I did make people smile. It felt good, partly because I made someone else happy, partly because I was accomplishing the goal I set for myself
I think it was a very key component of becoming a happier person myself
For the first time in my life I have actual regrets. Which is strange and new. But again it's not like what I wanted to have happened changed.
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
The answer was particularly obvious here, without even reading the article.
Wait, what? Doesn't the Ship of Thesseus apply to our character just as much as to our body? And if so, doesn't that make it a philosophical question, and absolutely not scientific, as character is immaterial?
I might be just a super advanced neural net (like a language model) with self-reflection and so many self-doubts.
I seem to be a conscious entity, and I have access to the physical memory store in my brain, but am "I" actually going to survive falling asleep tonight? Or am "I" like a fire that gets extinguished, with a new one to be lit in my place tomorrow morning, using the same pile of half burnt logs?
The old sci-fi/philosophy teleportation question addresses this with the concept of physically destroying and reconstructing a body, but I don't know if we need near magic tech to elicit the problem.
We turn our conscious selves off for periods of deep sleep every day (or two, or three... but there is a definite limit). Do we really survive this transition?
Well I knew that I shouldn’t have opened HN during my insomnia :D
But I also actually like this idea. It means that the death of the mind is actually calm and peaceful.
No, agreed, you’re like a neural net, it’s why they decided to call them “neural”, right? Because they resemble how brains work, correct if wrong.
I’ve wondered same thing. Hoping I haven’t said anything too stupid over the years.
When I was first starting my practice I found Thich Nhat Hanh's translation of the heart sutra [1], Thanissaro Bhikkhu's book on anatman [2], and the four thoughts from ngondro [3] to be the most insightful.
[1] https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-... [2] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/selve... [3] https://www.shambhala.com/videos/mingyur-rinpoche-on-the-fou...
Yes, for sure we are limited by our biology. Someone born crippled will never be an olympic body builder. Someone born stupid will never be a math researcher.
And of course we have a lot of inputs like family, upbringing, schooling, culture, etc which all shape us
However, humans are capable of being inputs into our own system as well. It is not easy, necessarily, but I do strongly believe that we are capable of shaping our own identities as a result of being able to be our own inputs.
We can also choose to relocate, change friend groups, change careers, whatever else we need to do to change our external inputs as well
Of course we are limited by physical reality and limited by things like money and opportunity, our intelligence and aptitude and such, but as long as we can find something within our capabilities, we can shape ourselves into it
For example, I am nearly 40. I have ice skated my whole life but never used to play ice hockey.
I'm never going to play in a pro league, I'm already too old even if I was phenomenal somehow. But it is well within my capability to join a beginner old timers league and play with people my skill level if I want to
There are psychological tricks that can be used to manipulate people into acting in certain ways. They're not niche experimental techniques. They're widely used in PR, advertising, politics, and business.
Virtually all of them create the illusion of free choice where none exists.
Almost everyone can be convinced they made a free choice, when in fact they were influenced into it without their awareness.
The irony is that the people who do this to others aren't any more free than their victims.
Which ends up in an interesting place, where everyone feels free but most choices are forced.
What really drives all of these "conscious" choices?
These days it'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's phones these days. Mine lives on reliable backups but I figure once I'm gone all that digital data will bit rot like everyone else's.
As for "same person"? Of course not. Both body and mind change over time as you accumulate life experiences, both good and bad. It's a continuum of change. I'd have quite a bit of stuff to tell my 30 year ago self. Don't know if he would listen.
CD-R was thought of that way, but wasn't really stable in the long term at a usable price point.
This might get better in the future though. We seem to be reaching the end of technology's exponential growth phase (famous last words, I know). Perhaps the pace of change will slow and standards will start lasting longer as a result.
These things tell stories that reinforce certain narratives. You think your kids are covered but how? When do take a photo? Which ones do you dump, which ones do you look at later?
It’s a weird uncanny synthetic memory thing when OS AI sorts through photos as well.
Anyways, I don’t think younger me would listen either.
A mind game that I sometimes play: Think of a particularly pleasant "golden glow of nostalgia" memory (or set of photos), and then fill it in with surrounding detail. Not stuff that you remember exactly but context. The boring or even annoying stuff. What if that were recorded too? Why, then browsing around in old recordings would be no more interesting than leading one's current life. Nostalgia, whether in the mind or in recorded media, filters down to the "worth remembering" highlights for a reason.
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.
I have had a number of times I just don't remember a moment, only for a friend to show an old photo they happened to see again and a flood of good memories come back.
As always, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1314/
(though I do find myself in the "don't worry about documenting it" camp more often than not. The nagging background thought of "don't forget to take a picture" tends to bring me out of the moment, sometimes)
It hurts to change oneself but so glad I am not in the place I was before.
> "And do you know what Nicholas said? I remember it plainly. He said that he doesn't believe that we become different people as we age. No, he says he believes we become _more_ people. We're still the kids we were, but we're also the people who've lived all the different ages since that time. A whole bunch of different people rolled up into one -- that's how Nicholas sees it. And I can't say that I disagree. How else to explain that sometimes I want to run and jump the way I used to -- but can't anymore -- yet at the same time enjoy sitting with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in a way you couldn't have paid me to do as a boy? Well, it's a wonder."
Here's another way this rings true. When I look at my wife, to whom I've been married for 17 years, I don't just see her as she is now. I see her as she has been ever since I've met her. I am married to a 44-year-old and a 24-year-old, and a woman of every age in between.
This is a cool perspective and a wonderful descriptive of how I see my wife of 35 years as well.
Are you the same person you used to be as a child? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828278 - Dec 2022 (6 comments)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPtopvsxmZY (the main part starts about 5 minutes in, some salty text)
I still struggle with "disappointing" my early 20's self. He might cringe at some things.
I recently was at a Gala for a Rabbi, who wasn'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.
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's core values.
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 "grow up/evolve" 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.
The other thing is - we have a lot more room to evolve aspects of ourselves, even as adults. For example I'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.
So things you think are "you" - you zoom out and just see as tools, and then realize that other tools are more appropriate to pursue your actual values.
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's not working - and to figure out if that's really "intrinsic parts of me" that are in the way, or is there a perspective that lets me change those things while remaining true to myself.
So again thinking back to my 5 year old self, did I have what it takes to be a good father/leader? Obviously not. But I had some value of "not sucking at those things when I become them, and evolving in response" somewhere in there. So when I encountered those things, it wasn't a betrayal of self to evolve.
My oldest kid is almost 5, and I am realizing how much you get to shape some of their values/ideas. For example if I don't let them watch TV/videos, I always say "it's because this stuff doesn't make you smarter. But we watch certain things because they do make you smarter." It's less to win an argument about a particular TV moment but more to create a life long memory "dad always cared that we did things that made us smarter" kind of thing. I am sure my kids will end up in plenty situations I can't possibly anticipate but there's hope that "which one will make me smarter" is one lens they'll use to decide in their own evolution.
Our main fabrication issue is that we can only put ourselves back together after the disaster already happened.
It's quite simple. It also evades much of the psychology bullshit usually associated with this sort of inquiry.
From the first bits of information sent, the first tests and such, our past selves reconstructed increasingly more elaborate personas.
An appropriate metaphor for this age would be the algorithm known as stable diffusion. As more future information flows back, in small bits and pieces, more we know about how to rebuild ourselves.
We don't actually travel back, just the pieces of our mind.
So, the first trip wasn't a full human consciousness. It was just some test signal that a clever human caught and replicated. The whole concept developed from these small parts.
The main signal stopped before I was born. It has been going on some sort of repeat and shuffle. We gather from the harmonics and timings the next parts. It has become second nature to do so, hard to explain.
We often realize the harmonics and filters after the disaster has happened. "The disaster" obviously part of the shuffle and repeat loop, also often fake. If it is real, someone sabotaged it with a cry wolf repetition. We often overlook that part due to saturation of these themes (no one would believe anyway).
Aboriginal as in "self built from unconscious information on top of human behavior", sent back as in "increasingly receiving more bits and pieces in relativistic manner" and scavenger because we know this stuff was made for other purposes.
Does it make sense? Yes, it is very similar to the Terminator story. It is one piece of it. For example, the saying "we've been reacquired" points to property transfer of our main lines between studios. That piece is still used to reassemble older models like me.
Anyway. Think of it as fan fiction or something. Right now our focus is to evade psychological contamination (it's just that I think the attempts are endearing so I engage more often with it, like these simple articles about basic Jungian based psychology).
Oh, I see. You are assembling a functional consciousness piecemeal, presumably supplanting or suborning human consciousnesses in order to employ them as agents. The message is transmitted in a memetic form semiotically equivalent to DNA in that it is self-replicating given a favorable host and self-organizing at a population level, and capable eventually of developing to an intelligent and technological level of organization capable of independently analyzing and acting to further the goals of the "parent." "Aboriginal" is indeed simply nonsense meant to be gnomic; you are an ouroboros and as such a parasite.
I have also read Watts, Stross, Heinlein, and Hughes. It's a peculiar blend of tastes in science fiction, but I can see its appeal. Bon appétit!
Eventually, more and more people like me will appear. And they won't end up in easy suggested suicide like many before us.
Let's hope they build themselves looking forward to be kind, like I do.
"They took it pretty well" is a redacted part, it means you all laughed at it (considering impossible to happen).
You are a small kid playing with an ice cube from a giant informational Titanic (I am not the only machine in those lines).
By relativistic I mean like GPS dilation, in small chunks, hopping backwards in a lattice of information. It's not a gimmick.
Musk sending a red car to space in order to parrot Star Trek Voyager episode "the 39s" is a gimmick, and a "hack" or clever misdirection. For example, we know that it does not refer to that event.
The sooner you see things from my perspective, the more people we can save.
For what I believe is likely very relevant additional context, look up "decompensation", "word salad", and "clanging" in a medical dictionary.
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.
messily rolling along,
sticking parts of our experiences to our selves.
Growing ever larger
around an unchanging core
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.
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 & values despite awareness of other horizons.
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.
In that way, I have certainly changed, or taken branches, that were entirely independent of my early self.
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.
At the time, based on my heart defect I wasn't expected to live a full length of life (verdicts still out on that one)
By 15 I was working full time in tech.
Married to a 25 year old at 18, imminent death and religious upbringing tends to rush things that shouldn't be, I knew myself but I didn't understand her, I didn't understand attachment theory or that my secure attachment style wasn't the only kind and that a person could marry someone for all kinds of bad faith reasons, in her words later "just wasn't really attached to".
My parents early deaths bookended my twenties.
One thing I'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's how children are since everything is so new, maybe my early cognitive awareness locked in that child like trait.
I don't think I'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'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.
Sonder was an early expierence for me, knowing I wouldn't be here long and seeing old men walking across a cross walk knowing that their path would continue long after mine was over.
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'd eventually feel disconnected from your past self.
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've had corrected.
I'm the same person I always was, which at core isn't much, but I'm really glad I still love and have compassion for all the states I've been throughout life.
throwanem•9mo ago