Source: http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/i-have-died-many-times

At a recent dinner, my wife and I realized we’ve known each other for ten years. This, naturally, led to our reminiscing of what we were doing ten years ago and discussion of what we might do ten years hence. The answer: ‘we’ won’t be doing anything. We will be dead.

Not in-the-ground dead but, dead in the same way our decades-younger selves are dead. The death of no longer existing.

We’re grateful for the decisions our younger selves made. Their marriage in the desert led to our dinner by the river, but though their lives are connected to ours by a string of contiguous days, they are not us. They are no more.

Like the Ship of Theseus your mind replaces itself one small part at a time. Memories fade, memories exaggerate, the new pushes out the old. It happens slowly, but it happens, until your mind is an new inhabitant of an old skull.

This is why we so often look back at the thoughts and actions of our younger selves with incomprehension. Who was that person?Just who did all those stupid things? Just who had those foreign thoughts? Someone else did.

This is more difficult to perceive in adulthood: often a span of years less and less differentiated. But the further back you go the more undeniable it is. Would you and your 20-year-old self agree on career decisions? Would you and your teenage-self get along?

What have you in common with your ten-year-old self? Though he may share some basic traits and he may look like you, is he you? Would he make any of the same decisions as you? Like what you like? Think what you think?

No. He’s dead.

Go further: that baby in the photograph isn’t you. He isn’t evenanyone. Though, through the power of accumulated days, he will become someone. His brain grows and prunes itself daily. As does yours.

This slow death is what allows for change: take control of it, encourage it. Murder yourself to make room for yourself.

You can thank or curse the dead past-yous for the decisions they made, but it’s meaningless. Your past-selves are like ThePeloponnesian War: necessary for the shape of present-day Europe while also completely irrelevant to it.

Your decisions affect the landscape of the future-you: where you live, your family, your work. But when making decisions, make them as though for a stranger: if the change is big enough or the time long enough, that is exactly who you will be to your current self.

The present-you is all there is, and the future-you is built daily on his ashes.