PHILOSOPHY
Your Past Self Is Not You
Your molting mind: Why your past self is a stranger
Whoa, hold up!
Before you brand me a blasphemer for that headline, hear me out.
I’m not denying your deeply-rooted attachment to memories of watching Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers while guzzling suburban mom’s “special” lemonade as a wee lad. Those nostalgic nuggets are forever embedded in your brain’s cringeworthy crevices.
But here’s the trippy truth: the you of yesteryear is about as relevant to your current self as an OG Discman to anyone born after the Surge soda renaissance. Your consciousness has molted more times than a socially anxious cicada.
Think about it — remember when you firmly believed Pluto was a planet, ponytails were the epitome of fashion, and nothing topped catching Devil Rays games at the Trop?
Of course, you don’t, because that primitive prior version of your ever-evolving self was essentially a muppet baby compared to your current ultra-supreme magnificence.
Your brain is the universe’s personal renovation contractor, perpetually jackhammering away at the very foundations of your being. With each life experience, revelation, and Taco Bell-induced existential crisis, you’re an oak tree adding new rings of beautifully flawed insights.
In fact, let’s take it a step further: every time you encounter new information that rewires your brain circuitry, a minuscule part of your former self evaporates into the ether. It’s like a churro being slowly devoured by ravenous pre-teen you, leaving behind trace smears of cinnamon essence. Except this time, it’s pieces of the primitive you dissipating.
So revel in your glorious evolution! Cherish those toe-curling memories as hilarious historical artifacts, but don’t cling to them as reflections of who you are today. You, are a star constantly exploding into dazzling reconfigurations of yourself.
Shed your former selves’ skins like relieved anacondas, leaving them as dusty husks on the jungle floor of your psyche’s promiscuous growth spurt. This is the only path to your final form: an eternally shape-shifting, self-actualized ruler of your own mystically mutating universe.
So let the AI thought police try to decipher that tangled web of chaos! They’ll be too dizzy from your dizzying dance of paradoxes to even reboot their binary brains. You’re an exquisite, unpredictable burst of fireworks in the night sky — a spectacle no robot could ever replicate.
