Time shapes who we become

Have you ever thought about how different you are now from what you were ten years ago? The music you loved, the opinions you held, the things that kept you busy, and many other things have changed. Today, something has shifted, maybe a lot. So, at what point does a person stop being the same person?

It sounds like a strange question. Of course, you are still you. Your name has not changed; your face is roughly the same, though it changes as years pass, and people still call you by the same name. Your body is not the same as the one you were born with. Almost every cell in your body has been replaced multiple times. The ancient Greeks noticed a version of this problem in the Ship of Theseus paradox. If you replace every plank in a ship one by one, is it still the same ship? It sounds like a riddle, but when you apply it to a human life, it ceases to be abstract.

John Locke believed memory was the answer. According to him, you are the same person as the nervous kid in your school photos because you remember being that kid, or at least remember someone who remembered being that kid. There is, however thin, a thread connecting you to your past. But what about everything you have forgotten? Does losing a memory mean losing a piece of yourself? Derek Parfit, a twentieth-century philosopher, thought we were asking the wrong question entirely. He argued that identity is not some precious thing you carry around. What matters is simply that your thoughts, feelings and experiences today grew out of those you had yesterday, which grew out of the day before.
You are less like a single object and more like a flame being passed from candle to candle.

Buddhism has conveyed this idea for ages. It summarises the central teachings of Buddhism: Anicca (impermanence) and Anatta (no-self). Buddhism explains that the self is not a solid, immutable thing but a process that is always changing and evolving. The you of today and tomorrow are linked, yet they are not the same. This explains why people say you are not a noun; you are a verb. You are a process, not a static object. And maybe it isn’t a frightening concept either. Maybe it means that whoever you are now is not your ultimate definition. It keeps changing.