How You’ve Changed.
Over the 13 months that I have been in quarantine I have become very different person than the one that I always believed I was. Or, I have always been changing this rapidly, but have been incapable of recognizing the change, because the world has always changed with me. But now, given the complete separation from the world, I have become acutely aware of my own transformation. As is almost always the case, the reality is probably some combination of these two and many other factors not interesting enough for me to dramatically write about in my blog.
Because everything is always changing. And, I think that everything you need to- everything that there is to know about a person can be defined by how they react to change. Optimism, pessimism, realism, nihilism, romanticism, etc., are all just different ways of interpreting the state of constant and inevitable flux of the world around you. Every fallen tree, radical revolution, and radio station going out of business- every grey hair, jeans style, discontinued shampoo, and new Prius every year, every little shift, every progression, and sign of decay that you notice, is a reminder that the march of not just time, but change (if there really is a difference, that is) is replacing every single corner of the world you know, one closing bookstore at a time. Because it is.
How you view this process shapes your entire worldview. To the pessimist, this is the apocalypse. This is murder, and rot, and loss. To the optimist its rebirth, innovation, and growth. And for the realist, it is what it is.
I think you can see the most visceral of these reactions in broader culture, as I think many people have the most straightforward, pessimistic view of things: the world was one way when you were young, and over time it is changed into something new and foreign. If, as many are, someone is alienated by this transformation, the only logical option is to desperately cling to the old, the known, and to reach backwards, to drag the whole world back to what it once was in the hopes that they too will be new again. Nostalgia, conservatism, and facelifts are really all heads of the same beast.
For a moment let’s talk about Theseus’ ship. If, over the course of a journey, every piece of a ship is replaced, does it return home as the same ship? I think that it does; there is no real answer of course, but hear me out. Ships don’t really exist, they’re just collections of stuff we all agree to call “ships”, if replacing one board doesn’t make it a different ship, then changing every board doesn’t. Our definition of the original ship becomes entirely rhetorical the instant one atom drifts out of place. The same goes for identity, and, I think, for the world. I don’t become Thomas 2.0 when I pass my breakfast burrito, in the same way that the world you know and love doesn’t cease to exist when no one listens to talk radio anymore.
I know I am being exceedingly casual with both the metaphysics of identity and the disillusionment one feels when the world is changing around them, but I am not finished. Now, Thomas, you say (if I have made any sense up until this point), if our definition of the original ship of Theseus is really only valid when it is perfectly original, and it becomes totally conceptual when one atom is changed, isn’t that just all the more evidence for the hopelessness of inevitable change, as you lose both the world and yourself with even the most minor shift? No, because, and this is important, the universe is not a ship.
Though it is instinct, our creation of “original ship” identities, for both ourselves and our worlds is fundamentally mistaken. We are nostalgic for bygone eras but forget that those too were times of inescapable flux. Every era is a patchwork of those that came before it and those that will replace it, and the very fact I am using eras to describe it is self defeating. If you lament the radio, you should lament the telegraph, and the messenger pigeon, and smoke signals, and loud Paleolithic yells, and you should notice that all of these things still exist.
There has never been a two single instants, down to the smallest imaginable unit, since the beginning of imaginable time in which the world has been exactly the same. There has never been a point in its history, when someone slapped the world on its side and said, this is the true, real, original form from which all other forms it may take will be a deviation or transformation, and then sent it on its way only for it to be replaced piece by piece. At its very core, the identity of the universe is that it is always changing. So it is not the world, or its change, but the human definitions of these things that are out of place.
It isn’t that change is easy to deal with, really. What I am saying is that it is not as simple as optimism or pessimism, or rebirth or replacement, and that you are not a cobbled together facsimile of something you once were. The world is what it always was, and so are you, precisely because it is changing, not in spite of it. That is what this is. And maybe we should find some comfort in that.
