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Anyone else experience the feelings that you are constantly dying? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I don't know how to express or articulate my thoughts and my vocabulary and grammar gets messed up the more I write so I will just write simply.

What I'm trying to say is that every day or hour or minute or everytime you think, you feels like your original selves is dying. I know that we are constantly growing but i just can't stop thinking that whenever we grow or learning new things or start to think differently, our past selves is dead. I think back to my past selves in middle school, highschool and from 2022 and think, aren't they dead? No matter what i do or think or whatever happens to me, i can't bring back the personalities or "me"s from the past. They remain dead and continue to being dead. Unless they are exist in another timeline or universe.

What exactly is identity, consciousness or the self which is me? I don't know nor understand but this idea just stuck in my mind and occasionally appears when I'm bored, stressed or relaxed.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think of a tree. It's a tiny little sprout that grows into a sapling that grows into a young tree that grows into a regular tree that grows into a giant.

Yet when I think back to the sprout or the sapling, I don't think of someone that's gone. I get like a cartoon image of the big tree, with the little tree still fully formed inside it, like the big tree has made a cave that shelters the smaller tree. The smaller tree is still there in all it's form, it's just safe and sheltered and a bit harder to see.

[–] owenfromcanada 2 points 11 months ago

This is a great analogy. If you were to look inside the tree, you'd see the rings that show the progress of how it had grown. Those earlier versions aren't there in the same sense, but they are still there in a very real way.