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.
I went through a period of this when I was younger. I did not find a satisfactory way of dealing with those thoughts, but they did eventually recede.
There’s quite a bit of philosophy out there abut this. It might help to read about it. Some physics topics are related, like the Planck scale. If you want to read about what others have thought on the topic, here’s a starting point.
So: yes, you’re not alone.
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.
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 the 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?
Related: Ship of Theseus
You also replace the atoms inside of your body and nether your state of mind nor your physical body are the same in a few moments. Everything changes and time moves forward, relentlessly.
You can go to past, but nobody is there anymore
How do you know you can’t become those past selves again? If you did have that ability imagine what that would be like…
Let’s say you want to bring back your middle school self. You would forget everything that came after middle school, you would become that middle schooler again. Not only that, but to truly be your past self, you would have to be in the same situation, place, point in time. Otherwise the change in environment would be reflected in a change in your mind and that change would mean you are a new person, not your past self. To truly become your past self, you would just be back in middle school and the future would still be ahead. If you pressed a button that did that, after you pressed the button you would not and could not know anything happened at all.
Going beyond that, maybe you have the ability to become your future selves as well. Maybe you have both of these abilities and you just don’t know, can’t know. If you did, you couldn’t tell.
For all you know, in between every moment you jump around and become every version of yourself. Maybe every possible version of yourself. Maybe in between every moment you become every person that has ever lived or will ever live. Every saint and murderer, every animal and bug, every rock and star and black hole. Everything and everyone. And in all that jumping around you would eventually land back to this current moment and version of you, except one timestep in the future. And you wouldn’t know any of that jumping around happened, because to be you in this moment you can’t be anything else.
You are not separate from the universe, you are the universe. Past, present, and future.
