How do you know you can’t become those past selves again? If you did have that ability imagine what that would be like…

Let’s say you want to bring back your middle school self. You would forget everything that came after middle school, you would become that middle schooler again. Not only that, but to truly be your past self, you would have to be in the same situation, place, point in time. Otherwise the change in environment would be reflected in a change in your mind and that change would mean you are a new person, not your past self. To truly become your past self, you would just be back in middle school and the future would still be ahead. If you pressed a button that did that, after you pressed the button you would not and could not know anything happened at all.

Going beyond that, maybe you have the ability to become your future selves as well. Maybe you have both of these abilities and you just don’t know, can’t know. If you did, you couldn’t tell.

For all you know, in between every moment you jump around and become every version of yourself. Maybe every possible version of yourself. Maybe in between every moment you become every person that has ever lived or will ever live. Every saint and murderer, every animal and bug, every rock and star and black hole. Everything and everyone. And in all that jumping around you would eventually land back to this current moment and version of you, except one timestep in the future. And you wouldn’t know any of that jumping around happened, because to be you in this moment you can’t be anything else.

You are not separate from the universe, you are the universe. Past, present, and future.

You can go to past, but nobody is there anymore

Alternatively, your past selves are immortal. They can’t be harmed. Nothing that didn’t happen to them can ever happen to them.

I’ve always thought of that as renewal of the self instead of the self dying.

Your personality is based largely upon your human experience.

As you get older and experience more, you have more things from the world around you to use to orient your thoughts and feelings on the world, and because thoughts and feelings are what the human experience is at its basest level, it will change your personality continuously.

I experienced much the same through and up into my mid twenties. I have found that upon reaching my 30’s that it does not happen as much, or at least it takes much more thought and feeling to change my personality.

You too will reach a point where you obtain a certain confidence in who you are and what you actually believe in, and after that, you will not experience the feeling of being a different person every couple of years as much.

My advice to you since you recognize this in yourself is to pay attention to it. If you can realize that it is possible you could be a different person in a couple years, who would you want to be? What would make you happy?

Focus on that, use it.

Yes, often.

We as thinking beings consider ourselves to be constant. The trail of memories leading from our childhoods to today make it feel as though we are still that person who lived through all of those times, but we aren’t. We can’t be.

I have memories belonging to an 8 year old boy in my mind, he had the same name I did and lived with parents who also had the same name as mine, but I am a much older person - older than his parents, even - and I share almost no common ground with this boy. How can we be the same person, when we are so obviously different?

I am physically a different person to this person of my memories, and I can’t be sure he exists or existed. He may simply be a figment of my imagination, a story I tell myself of where I have come from but made up from whole cloth.

Hey, friend. I am not a doctor and I cannot diagnose you, but, if these kinds of thoughts are constantly on your mind and cause anxiety, you might wanna glance over the symptoms of something called “existential ocd” to see if you relate. Ocd has a lot of subtypes and they aren’t well known among the general public. There’s also helpful videos on YouTube about existential ocd. I hope you find relief.

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.

You’ve probably hit upon a good metaphor for what’s happening.
I believe each time we sleep parts of our personalities are torn down and rebuilt slightly differently.
Whatever the mechanism, you aren’t really the same person you were years ago, you’re a different person with many of the same memories. The “self” is a useful simplification of reality. At the fundamental level, its not possible to define “you” and “not you” at a moment in time, much less across spans of time.

Good, I hate those past me’s

Not a fan of the current guy either

Yes. I think you might like this article and other musings of this guy https://robertsaltzman.substack.com/p/im-a-different-person-now

I have their memories, so how can they be dead? Personalities change over time, so it’s only natural to see your past self differently.

The questions you pose are exactly the type of thing one can explore through various forms of meditation.

The thing we usually associate with self can not, in fact, be it, as it is just an appearance in our consciousness. It is a sort of thought, really. Our consciousness, however, is just the sum total experience of the present moment. Everything before is no more, everything after may only be.

I hope my ramblings made sense.

Probably isn’t going to help you at all but we get an entirely new skeleton every five years thanks to our osteoclasts and osteoblasts.

The other way to think about it is not to concentrate on your past self dying but a new self being born.

It’s sad when you think that you and I have to die. But the flip side to that is that it is a complete miracle that we will never understand that we even came to being, were born, live, are aware and exist for a brief moment in this amazing universe on this planet.

Your past selves aren’t dead. You just evolved into what you are now. That’s what we do.