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.