Why you should kill off and rebuild the best parts Of yourself — per ancient philosophy
My mother does this funny thing when I fly home to visit.
She slips into this worried-mom mode, giving me ultra basic life tips, “Remember to make your bed and be punctual.”
“Listen to other people’s advice about your writing.” She still sees me as this insanely stubborn and totally disorganized teenager from 20 years prior.
No, I’m not the first adult to be treated like a child by his mother. But that fixed perspective is a great index on how most people think: Humans have an intrinsic bias against the capacity for change — in themselves and others. I’m guilty too.
I bumped into an ex-girlfriend, whom I’d dated in high school. She was a beautiful brunette cheerleader with big eyes. She was wild and full of charisma; her personality bubbled and popped with energy. Her laugh could crack a windshield. She was one of those girls who always had a boyfriend, and I was but a short link in a long chain of them.
20 years later, and very recently, I stepped out of my local gym to leave and heard, “Sean!” I spun around and, boom, it was her. She couldn’t have been more different.
She was wearing a full black pantsuit, carrying an expensive purse. A tall teenage boy stood with her, tapping his feet impatiently. It was her son. She was still beautiful — albeit in a more mature and refined way. As we talked, I was caught off guard by her changed voice. She spoke with a measured eloquence that was far removed from the troublemaking cheerleader I knew.
She sounded hyper-educated, like a strict principal of a fancy prep school. This was odd, because I vividly remember her doctoring the Ds on her report card into As before her parents saw. It turns out she is a big-shot attorney now. She’d gone through a divorce and some heavy life-on-life stuff and it showed — for the better. She seemed so squared away.
I walked away inspired but also shaking my head in disbelief, “She sounds…so adult now.” Some subconscious part of me assumed I’d bump into a mature cheerleader, not a hotshot lawyer. Every small part of your persona is in a cycle of death and rebirth —which produces massive change over time. At the biological level, a cellular Hunger Games is afoot. Roughly 100,000,000,000 cells die each day only to be replaced by other cells.
The process is called apoptosis, or “Programmed Cell Death”.
It’s not uncommon for your body to replace an equivalent to its own mass each year — keyword “equivalent”, not identical.
This relates to an ancient Greek thought experiment
Imagine you have a big wooden ship. It’s been used for years and in order to stay operational, each of its parts is replaced over time. Eventually, all parts are replaced. Is it still the same ship? This is the “Ship of Theseus” paradox. The smartest philosophers have debated it for thousands of years. Entire books have been written on it.
Thomas Hobbes made the paradox even more confusing. He wondered if all the original discarded parts were brought together to build a ship, leaving us with two ships, which would be the original? And while the body’s cells might replace themselves automatically, the Ship of Theseus can only change through action. The rotting blanks are manually pried out by sailors. The cracked oars are replaced by a craftsman’s skill and effort. The Ship of Theseus is loaded with symbolism, but in particular, it is a metaphor for identity and the power of incrementality.
You unknowingly replace so much of yourself that you eventually become that very paradox: the exact same person, but definitely not. Yet so many people resign themselves to being stuck with the same appearance, personality, and way of thinking. They don’t realize they are already in a state of perpetual change.
Each day is an act of renewal or an act of decay, but never stagnation.
The thing to think about
You need only look back at yourself from 10 or 20 years ago, and you will (hopefully) see varying levels of naivete in those earlier selves.
It’s as Heraclitus once wrote, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” You either choose to be a pilot of that change or become a passenger in your own life.
The hard part is that this requires accepting the contradiction that — in order to improve your quality of life, you have to be willing to suffer. Old vices and flaws reemerge and need to be killed. Our dreams die and need to be revived. It is within this tug and pull, when our wants are pitted against our needs, that so many of us are left marooned. Our bad habits quietly shuffle back into our lives, replacing new parts on our Ship of Theseus with leaky planks and shoddy oars.
It is akin to when your body fails to kill and replace cells, which causes cancer, jeopardizing the integrity of the whole. Don’t assume you are incapable of evolving. Just as you shouldn’t assume people from your past are still the same villains.
Bullies find enlightenment through an overdue ass whooping. Mean girls realize their popularity was hollow, that their boyfriend was a loser, and that there’s is more to life than ascending the pecking order of a superficial hen’s nest.
They suffered. Parts of them died. And then they learned. Remember, you are the Ship of Theseus, and also its captain. Aspire to become the paradox of two selves. Stand vigilant and ensure the ship that pulls into the harbor is nicer than the one that left.
