Do People Ever Really Change?
A few days ago, Nasheet posed an interesting question: “Do people ever really change? Or is every “change” a step closer to being who you truly are to begin with?” It is a question that I have been asking myself a lot lately.
Recently, my life has undergone a number of changes. Some of them have led me to be more of the person I have wanted to be. I go to the office for eight hours a day. I go to the gym six days a week with Milind. I occasionally practice rudiments on the drums. These are things I have told myself for years that I wanted to do, because I thought they were good for me. However, up until this point, I have never been able to do them consistently.
What has me concerned a bit is wondering if I can keep it up. There often seems to be a discrepancy between the kind of person one wants to be and the kind of person one actually is. Deep inside, am I actually the person I want to be or are these changes just temporary? My hope is that they are more long term. But have I always had the energy to do these things and just never done it or is there something inherent in my personality that means I am doomed to fail at these endeavors?
In the end, we cannot escape who we are. I have seen this time and time again in other people and in myself. For instance, I find parties to be very awkward situations. I have since I first started going to them in college. For the most part, I try to avoid them or, if I do go, I don’t go for very long. I always feel out of place. At first, I believed it had to do with the fact that I did not drink alcohol while others got very drunk. However, this discrepancy no longer exists, as I do drink now and the parties I go to are not full of lunatic drunks. Yet no matter where it is or with whom I’m out, a party makes me want to curl up in a corner. (For an accurate description of I how a feel, see lyrics for “Costume for a Gutterball” by Finger Eleven.)
So I have gone three paragraphs without really answering the question at hand. I suppose for more trivial matters, it is possible to change who someone is. These are the parts of us that we might be willing and able to change for another person, like a boyfriend or girlfriend. They are parts of us that only make up the surface of who we are. These things change to suit the situation we are currently in: what time we get up, whether we put one or two spoonfuls of sugar in our coffee, etc.
However, I believe there are parts of our personalities that are always with us and changes tend to guide us towards that person. In fact, we can spend a lot of energy trying to change not to be that person, or trying to avoid that person. There can perhaps be no greater fear than knowing you are not who you want to be. Changing to try to avoid this person only gets us in trouble, as we end up back as that person again.
Whatever we change into comes from some potential within ourselves. I imagine one could relate this idea to René Descartes’ Third Meditation, “Concerning God, That He Exists” from his Mediations on First Philosophy. In the Third Meditation, Descartes argues that the fact that we can perceive ourselves as imperfect beings means we must have some notion of perfection against which to compare. However, this perfection against which we compare is not a part of us, so it must be that something with that perfection exists if we are able to perceive the difference.
Perhaps the same can be said about the person we change into. In changing into someone I am not currently, I must have some perception of the difference between that person and who I am right now. In order to perceive that difference, such a person must already exist. Therefore, changing as a person is a step closer to being someone who truly exists to begin with.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:42 am
Most people don’t realize they need to take care of themselves until their first heart attack. Most of those people don’t live long enough to do anything about it, let alone feel themselves hit the floor. Congratulations on “getting it” at 25. I’m hoping I figure it out sometime soon, preferably before the first coronary.
I believe very strongly in willpower; I just don’t have any. I believe you can do anything to which you put your mind; I’m just lazy. We are victims of our own lack of discipline. (I think that bit is Hegel, something about freedom being self-discipline, but don’t quote me; it has been a few years.)
The idea that all changes take us closer to our true selves or who we are to begin with seems counter-intuitive to me. But so does quantum physics and the law of torts. That doesn’t make it true, but it certainly makes it plausible. Michelangelo supposedly said he sculpted by starting with a piece of marble and removing everything that wasn’t the statute. Could we be doing the same thing as people? That certainly seems plausible. It is just as possible as us being the sum of the impact of our choices and experiences on the genes our parents gave us.
R. tells me our bodies replace all of our cells every seven years. On odder days, she hits me with the multiverse theory of self. At least that’s what I call it. Since the universe we inhabit is branching in infinite directions every moment, each instant is a new person. I didn’t believe her when she said she obsessed over this in high school, writing letters to her future self so she wouldn’t be forgotten since that self would essentially be dead. She showed me the letters. We have a weird relationship. (She’ll likely kill me for writing that, but she never goes online anymore so I’m safe.)
Those two perspectives are probably more literal than for what you are looking, but that’s how I roll. :-)
Good luck with the existential crisis. Give me a call sometime.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:01 am
Wow. Look at us. Here we are, living well into our twenties and still struggling with the questions of self-identity. Piaget may have said about us that we never fulfilled one of the fundamental levels of human development. Nevertheless, it is interesting to know that there are other people out there thinking about the same things as myself. Personally, I have rarely struggled with my self-identity. My time has been spent pondering the worth of that identity in the world. Maybe we envision a more perfect self because we believe we can be of greater worth to the world. It is our everyday mundane lives that constantly remind us of missed opportunities to help create a “better” world. Better is the ambiguous adjective whose definition lies entirely inside the speaker. I then ask you, what will make this a “better” world?
G
February 2nd, 2006 at 8:24 pm
When you get REALLY old, you just “let it be.” Believe me, I know.
February 24th, 2006 at 10:21 am
yes, I’m a bit slow about catching up on web stuff, but I just read this entry, and it’s full of really cool thoughts. I’m glad that you’re thinking about this stuff. do we ever change? I think most certainly yes, but the changes are incremental, so they are hard to notice if you’re just looking over the span of a couple of years.
Taking your party example, though, I used to not like parties at all either, but now I think that they are great. Your argument is that certain fundamental aspects of personality are fixed, which I think is true. Cognitive psychologists have demonstrated links even between personality and genetics (maybe you knew this from experience already, but it’s cool that now there is evidence!).
for the record, I don’t believe piaget any more than I believe freud. psychologists and their bizarre explanations for mental situations have never sat well with me.
February 18th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
I stumbled on your site by accident. But then again, I don’t beleive there are accidents.
I too don’t like parties, never have. I feel uncomfortable, not because I’m antisocial, but I suppose I don’t understand what the purpose is. As far as people changing, I think people can change if they choose to.
I also beleive that when we are born, we are born as God intended us to be. And by the time we die, we are what the world has made us. I am who I was when I was born, now I am that plus what the world has done to me, for me, or against me. And so I use the basis of what God made me to ‘treat the symptoms of what the world has made me’. And so, in that sense I suppose we change.