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.
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 past selves of me again. Doesn’t that count as being “dead”?
By that rationale, wouldn’t other people then also be dead, as you cannot experience their consciousness?
Hey, friend. I am not a doctor and I cannot diagnose you, but, if these kinds of thoughts are constantly on your mind and cause anxiety, you might wanna glance over the symptoms of something called “existential ocd” to see if you relate. Ocd has a lot of subtypes and they aren’t well known among the general public. There’s also helpful videos on YouTube about existential ocd. I hope you find relief.
Thanks for your consideration. I’ll keep that in mind.
Personally, I’m glad that fuck-up is dead.
The other way to think about it is not to concentrate on your past self dying but a new self being born.
It’s sad when you think that you and I have to die. But the flip side to that is that it is a complete miracle that we will never understand that we even came to being, were born, live, are aware and exist for a brief moment in this amazing universe on this planet.
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’ve always thought of that as renewal of the self instead of the self dying.
Your personality is based largely upon your human experience.
As you get older and experience more, you have more things from the world around you to use to orient your thoughts and feelings on the world, and because thoughts and feelings are what the human experience is at its basest level, it will change your personality continuously.
I experienced much the same through and up into my mid twenties. I have found that upon reaching my 30’s that it does not happen as much, or at least it takes much more thought and feeling to change my personality.
You too will reach a point where you obtain a certain confidence in who you are and what you actually believe in, and after that, you will not experience the feeling of being a different person every couple of years as much.
My advice to you since you recognize this in yourself is to pay attention to it. If you can realize that it is possible you could be a different person in a couple years, who would you want to be? What would make you happy?
Focus on that, use it.
Good, I hate those past me’s
Not a fan of the current guy either
Well yeah that’s what we call personal growth. Middle school you is dead because present day you is too adult to act like that and have a child’s priorities again.
And in a couple years from now you’ll probably have given up some aspects of your current day life because they aren’t fulfilling you any more for any reason.
I think you’re growing (though not always for the better) at least as much as you’re “dying”. I say “at least” because you understand more and have more life experience, and, in many cases, you’re better able to appreciate things than you were when you were younger.
Your personality undergoes too much change to simply describe it as “dying”. That’s only half of what’s going on.
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.
