Reflection: The Story You Tell About Yourself

Prompts to consider

• Locke says you are who you remember. Parfit says your future self is not as intimately connected to present-you as you think, more like a very close friend than a literal continuation of you. If you genuinely held this view, how would it change your relationship to regret about the past (guilt for what past-you did) and anxiety about the future (fear of what future-you will suffer)?
• The narrative identity view says you construct personal identity through the story you tell about your life. What story are you telling about your life right now? Is it a story of progress, of struggle, of loss, of discovery? What does the story you are telling make possible, and what does it make invisible? Could a different story be told with the same events?
• Buddhism says the strong, bounded, persistent self is a construction, and that clinging to it is a major source of suffering. You don't have to be a Buddhist to notice whether this feels true in your own experience. Can you identify a moment recently when clinging to a particular self-concept caused suffering, when someone challenged who you thought you were and it hurt more than it should have? What was the self-concept you were protecting?