"... that he’s had the
same jovially jousting personality from two to seventy-two. He’s also
had the same interests—reading, the Second World War, Ireland, the Wild
West, the Yankees—for most of his life. He is one of the most
self-consistent people I know. The second Tim, my high-school friend,
sees his life as radically discontinuous, and rightly so. When I first
met him, he was so skinny that he was turned away from a blood drive for
being underweight; bullied and pushed around by bigger kids.... But after high school Tim suddenly
transformed into a towering man with an action-hero physique. He studied
physics and philosophy in college, and then worked in a neuroscience
lab before becoming an officer in the Marines and going to Iraq.... He shared a vivid
memory of a conversation he had with his mother, while they sat in the
car outside an auto mechanic’s: 'I was thirteen, and we were talking
about how people change. And my mom, who’s a psychiatrist, told me that
people tend to stop changing so much when they get into their thirties.
They start to accept who they are, and to live with themselves as they
are. And, maybe because I was an unhappy and angry person at the time, I
found that idea offensive. And I vowed right then that I would never
stop changing. And I haven’t stopped.'"
Writes Joshua Rothman in "Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?/Researchers have studied how much of our personality is set from childhood, but what you’re like isn’t who you are" (The New Yorker).
"Do the two Tims have the
whole picture? I’ve known my father-in-law for only twenty of his
seventy-two years, but even in that time he’s changed quite a bit,
becoming more patient and compassionate.... And there’s a
fundamental sense in which my high-school friend hasn’t changed. For as
long as I’ve known him, he’s been committed to the idea of becoming
different..... There’s a recursive quality to acts of self-narration. I
tell myself a story about myself in order to synchronize myself with the
tale I’m telling; then, inevitably, I revise the story as I change....
We change, and change our view of that change...."
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21 comments:
Judging by how long he's known his FiL, Rothman is having a mid-life crisis. His questions certainly match that mindset. I hope he revisits the article in about five years and checks his perspective then.
They are both timid.
Even worse, there are only a handful of behavioral options available between the two limits described. As one gets older, new acquaintances can be categorized as being much like another person already known. This would be depressing except for the rare experience, to be highly valued, of meeting a sui generis individual.
"I'm never going to stop changing"
Yeah OK. Except change for changes sake is dumb. "I'll never stop improving" makes more sense.
As for myself, i have changed over the years. I've gotten more tolerant, patient and less prone to anger. But I think that's just a standard thing. Of course not everyone does it. Just read Gellhorn's biography, and she remained an Angry and bitter woman till she died at age 90. She had an "anger management" problem and it never got solved.
My guess is that Tim number two doesn't exist as depicted.
"There’s a recursive quality to acts of self-narration. I tell myself a story about myself in order to synchronize myself with the tale I’m telling"
Indeed.
"he’s been committed to the idea of becoming different"
Since it assumes no one state or phase has intrinsic value worth preserving, that's just stupid--a form of autonihilism.
People who like their life settle into that but also moderate their sharp edges. People who don't, are thrust to make changes or to become bitter yet retain core personality within those changes. Our brain is designed to do whatever it needs to do in order to maintain the illusion of our being in charge. Just as we can have optical illusions tricking our brain so toonwe can have identity illusions. Magicians manipulate the former. Politicians and social gurus manipulate the latter.
I had a fairly bad accident that involved a subdural hematoma that was misdiagnosed and got to the point of stroke symptoms.
It took me a month to be able to focus my eyes enough to read and 3 months before a computer screen didn't make me nauseous.
I came back a different person in a way that was not consciously perceptible. The external stimulus was physical trauma.
My time in the Army changed things too, but those changes were as a result of external stimuli that was consciously received and reacted to. The external stimulus was people and how they behaved.
Both things changed who I was, but they did it differently.
Now we change girls into boys and boys into girls.
To paraphrase our president, that's a lot of fucking change.
I was going to say, if your father-in-law is called "Tim" and got through WWII, he must have been one tough son of a bitch, but now I see that 72 now makes him too young to have been in the service for "The Big One."
Do people change? Maybe you can have a different personality -- or at least a different public or social image -- in adult life than you did in childhood or adolescence, but when you are back with family or classmates, your old self reasserts itself. In the eyes of people you grew up with -- and maybe in your behavior with them -- you will be what you were.
Please have exact change
"Do the two Tims have the whole picture?"
Yeah because human experience is completely binary.
The funny thing for us is that we were both such extreme introverts growing up. It was so bad in grade school, that she was put into Special Ed. Her father would get frustrated telling the school authorities that it wasn’t that she couldn’t talk - she just refused to. She wouldn’t even say “present” when the teacher was taking attendance. Now, over a half century later, we are just the opposite. We have been stuck in the Trump hotel in LAS, the last month or so recovering from her latest back surgery, and she is known and loved by the entire hotel staff. The Security staff, when they catch her without her walker, send her back upstairs to get it. She does it by finding common ground with everyone. And, it has brought me out too - we sometimes compete to open up strangers first, by finding common ground with them.
Same person I was at age 18 as now?
No. Not even the same person I was ten years ago. Age changes all things, and it would be strange if just living life produced no change
My personality and interests have evolved over the decades.
Same person I was at age 18 as now?
No. Not even the same person I was ten years ago. Age changes all things, and it would be strange if just living life produced no change
Since cells in my body are routinely changing, and less than half of them are actually human, I'm not sure I've ever been the person I think I am.
Tim 2 plunged into new situations where he could either play the same roles or different ones. He chose to play different roles, so he became a "different person." Back home, with mom, he may not be that different from what he was.
Introverts can remain what they always were and just harden into old habits and attitudes over the years, but their withdrawal or reclusiveness may also be a result of limited opportunities. In another environment they might develop qualities that were always latent within.
I'll be a different person by the time I finish this comment. But still me.
I've become much more aware as I grow older of how temperaments and affinities run through families, and how little some people can change, even if they want to.
And I've seen more change for the worse then the better among them, net.
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