I found an old journal from when I was twenty-two last week. I opened it expecting to feel nostalgic, to remember who I was, to reconnect with some younger version of myself.

Instead, I felt like I was reading a stranger’s diary.

The concerns were mine—I recognized the situations, the people, the circumstances. But the person writing about them felt foreign. The way he thought about problems, the things he worried about, what he found important, how he processed the world—it was all recognizably me but also completely not me anymore.

There was this one entry about a decision I was agonizing over, something I’d spent weeks thinking about, something that felt monumentally important at the time. I can barely remember what I eventually chose. It mattered so much to twenty-two-year-old me, and it matters almost zero to me now.

You carry traces of who you were, but you’re also fundamentally different. Those past selves are both you and not you anymore.

Tomer Rozenberg

Reading that journal, I felt this strange mix of recognition and distance. Like looking at photos of yourself as a child—you know it’s you, you can see the resemblance, but you’re also fundamentally a different person now. That child is both you and not you. You contain them, carry traces of them, but you’re not them anymore.

And that made me realize: We’ve all been multiple people over the course of one life, and we barely acknowledge the strangeness of that.

The Versions You’ve Left Behind

Think about who you were five years ago. Not just what you did or where you lived, but who you actually were. What you cared about, what excited you, what you found meaningful, how you thought about yourself and your life.

Now think about who you were ten years ago. Fifteen years ago. At different ages, in different relationships, living in different cities, doing different work.

Each of those versions of you was real. Genuinely you, living your actual life, having real experiences and thoughts and feelings. But they’re also not you anymore. You’ve left them behind, grown past them, become someone different.

I look back at myself at twenty-three, fresh out of university, certain about things I’m not certain about anymore. Excited about career paths that don’t interest me now. Valuing things I don’t particularly value anymore. That person was genuinely me—I’m not disowning him or pretending he wasn’t real. But I’m also not him anymore.

The interests that consumed me then barely interest me now. The ambitions that drove me have shifted completely. The way I thought about relationships, about work, about what makes a life good—it’s all evolved in ways that twenty-three-year-old me couldn’t have predicted or maybe even understood.

I was someone who loved debating abstract political theory for hours. Now I find most of those debates exhausting and beside the point. I was someone who thought impact had to be visible and large-scale. Now I think most meaningful impact is quiet and local. I was someone who needed to prove something constantly. Now I’m more interested in just doing good work without needing validation.

These aren’t just changes in preference or opinion. They’re fundamental shifts in who I am, how I see the world, what I consider important. I’m a different person than I was at twenty-three, even though I’m still recognizably me.

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The Interests That Don’t Interest You Anymore

One of the clearest markers of becoming a different person is when things that used to fascinate you stop capturing your attention.

I used to read political philosophy voraciously. Spent hours thinking about democratic theory, governance structures, institutional design. It felt important and urgent and endlessly interesting. Now I rarely think about any of it. Not because I lost interest gradually—more like I woke up one day and realized I’d been someone who cared deeply about those things, and now I’m someone who doesn’t particularly.

This isn’t about maturing or growing beyond things. It’s not that political philosophy is childish and I’ve moved on to more sophisticated interests. It’s just that the person who found that endlessly fascinating isn’t who I am anymore. That curiosity, that drive to understand governance at a theoretical level—it belonged to a version of me that doesn’t exist now.

I’ve watched this happen with other things too. Sports used to matter to me in a way they don’t anymore. Certain kinds of music that defined entire periods of my life barely register now. Ways of spending time that felt essential then feel optional or even uninteresting now.

And it’s not just losing interest—it’s also gaining interest in things past versions of me wouldn’t have cared about at all. I’m fascinated by human behavior in ordinary moments in ways I never was before. I care about how people communicate, how relationships work, how to live intentionally—none of which particularly interested earlier versions of me.

These shifts in what captures your attention mark real changes in who you are. You’re not just the same person with different hobbies. You’re someone with a fundamentally different orientation to the world.

The Person Your Old Friends Remember

There’s something strange about being with people who knew you in a different era. They remember a version of you that you’re not anymore, and sometimes they still relate to you as if you’re that person.

I have friends from university who occasionally reference things I used to be into, opinions I used to hold, ways I used to be. And I find myself thinking: “Was I really like that?” Sometimes I barely remember being the person they’re describing.

It’s not that they’re wrong—their memories are accurate. I was that person. I did say those things, care about those issues, behave in those ways. But I’ve changed enough that being reminded of who I was feels almost like being told about someone else.

This creates a weird dynamic where you’re simultaneously the person they remember and not that person at all. You contain traces of who you were—the same sense of humor, some similar patterns, recognizable mannerisms. But the core of who you are has shifted in ways that make you fundamentally different from the person they knew.

I think this is part of why some friendships don’t survive time and distance. Not because of conflict or growing apart in some negative sense, but because you’re literally not the same people anymore. The friendship was between two people who don’t exist anymore. And the people you’ve become don’t necessarily have the same connection.

There’s also something unsettling about being seen as someone you used to be but aren’t anymore. It can feel like being misunderstood, like they’re relating to a ghost of you rather than your actual current self. You want to say “I’m different now,” but that feels dramatic. So instead you just feel slightly off, like you’re performing a version of yourself that doesn’t quite fit anymore.

The Strange Grief of Shedding Identities

We don’t really acknowledge that becoming a new version of yourself requires the death of old versions. And those deaths involve a kind of grief, even when the change is positive.

When I stopped being the person whose identity was wrapped up in political theory and government work, when I started becoming someone more interested in how individuals live their daily lives—that shift wasn’t just growth. It was also loss. Loss of an identity I’d built carefully, a version of myself I’d invested years in becoming, a way of understanding my place in the world.

That person had to die for the current me to emerge. And even though I like who I’ve become better, even though the change was necessary and good, there’s still something sad about no longer being that person. About looking back at him and thinking “You worked so hard to become someone I’m not anymore.”

I’ve noticed this with other identity shifts too. When you stop being the person who prioritizes one thing and start being the person who prioritizes something else. When you outgrow a role you worked hard to earn. When you realize you’re not the ambitious one anymore, or the social one, or the creative one, or whatever identity you’d built your sense of self around.

These transitions involve grief that we rarely name. Grief for the person you were, for the version of yourself that tried so hard, that cared so deeply about things you don’t care about anymore, that organized their whole life around priorities that aren’t your priorities now.

And there’s no good way to grieve these lost selves because they’re not really gone—you’re still here, still you. But they’re also not who you are anymore. It’s a strange kind of loss that doesn’t fit into normal categories of grief.

Would Your Past Self Recognize You?

I think about this sometimes: if twenty-year-old me met current me, would he recognize who he became? Would he approve? Would he understand the choices that led here?

I’m not sure he would. The path I’ve taken isn’t the one he imagined. The person I’ve become isn’t who he thought he’d be. The things I care about now would seem strange to him, maybe even disappointing. Where’s the grand political impact? Where’s the ambitious climb toward positions of influence? Where’s the person who was going to change systems and structures?

That person still exists in traces. I still care about impact and structure and making things better. But the way I think about those things has changed so fundamentally that twenty-year-old me might not recognize his own values in how I express them now.

I also wonder if I’d recognize past versions of myself if I met them now. Would I see the seeds of who I’d become? Or would I just see someone different, someone I happened to evolve from but who isn’t particularly like me anymore?

There’s something both unsettling and freeing about this. Unsettling because it means you’re not on some predetermined path of becoming more yourself—you’re actually becoming different selves over time. Freeing because it means you’re not stuck with who you’ve been. The person you are now doesn’t have to be continuous with the person you were then.

Loyalty to Past Selves vs. Current Selves

Here’s a question that’s been on my mind: Do you owe anything to your past selves?

When you’ve worked hard to become something, invested years in building a particular identity, made choices based on who you thought you’d be—do you owe it to that past self to stay that person? Or are you allowed to become someone completely different, even if it means the old you worked toward something you don’t want anymore?

I think about the version of me that worked so hard toward diplomatic career paths, who made decisions based on that future, who told people that’s where he was headed. That person invested real effort in becoming someone I’m not anymore. Do I owe him something? Am I betraying him by becoming someone different?

Or what about staying in touch with old friends because a past version of you valued those friendships, even though your current self doesn’t feel the same connection? Do you maintain relationships out of loyalty to who you were, even when they don’t fit who you are now?

I don’t have clean answers to these questions. But I’ve started to think that your primary loyalty has to be to your current self, to who you’re actually becoming, not to who you used to be or who you thought you’d be.

Past versions of you made the best choices they could with the information and self-knowledge they had at the time. But you have better information now. You know yourself more deeply. You’ve learned things that change what makes sense. And you’re allowed to honor that current knowing over past plans.

This doesn’t mean carelessly abandoning things just because you’ve changed. But it means recognizing that becoming a different person sometimes requires letting go of investments made by previous versions of yourself. That the person you were would want you to become who you need to be, even if it’s not who they imagined.

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The Continuity That Remains

Despite all this change, despite being multiple people over one lifetime, there’s something continuous. Some thread that runs through all the versions, some quality that makes them all recognizably you.

I’ve been trying to identify what that continuity is for me. It’s not interests—those have changed dramatically. It’s not values in the specific sense—what I care about has shifted. It’s not even personality in obvious ways—I’m more introverted now than I used to be, less argumentative, more focused on understanding than being right.

But there’s something. A way of approaching things, maybe. A certain kind of curiosity. A tendency toward analysis and synthesis. A desire to understand how things work and help them work better. Those have been consistent even as the content of what I’m curious about and trying to improve has changed completely.

There’s also something about wanting meaning and impact that’s stayed constant, even though my understanding of what constitutes meaningful impact has evolved dramatically. Twenty-year-old me and current me both care about making things better, we just have very different ideas about what better looks like and how to create it.

I think this continuity is important. It’s what makes you still you despite being multiple people. It’s the through-line that connects past versions to present versions, even when they’re radically different in most ways. You’re not a completely random sequence of different people—there’s some core that persists even as everything around it changes.

But that core is small compared to how much actually changes. The continuous part of you is real but thin. Most of who you are is genuinely different at different points in your life.

The Traces That Remain

Past versions of you don’t disappear completely. They leave traces. Ways of thinking, habits, preferences, patterns that persist even after the person who created them doesn’t exist anymore.

I still have some of twenty-three-year-old me’s habits around how I organize information, even though the content of what I’m organizing has changed. I still have some of his communication patterns, some of his humor, some of his ways of processing ideas.

These traces are like archeological evidence of who you used to be. You can see the layers of past selves in current behaviors, in automatic responses, in preferences that don’t quite fit who you are now but persist anyway because they were formed by someone you used to be.

Sometimes these traces are useful—skills and capacities built by past selves that serve current you even though the context has changed. Other times they’re just vestigial—patterns that made sense for who you were but don’t really serve who you are now.

I’ve noticed I still have some ambition patterns from earlier versions of myself who cared more about conventional success. That drive shows up sometimes even though it’s not really aligned with what I actually want now. It’s like an echo of someone I used to be, still influencing current me even though the person who created that pattern doesn’t exist anymore.

Permission to Be Different People

Here’s what I want you to know: You’re allowed to be different people at different points in your life. You’re allowed to become someone your past self wouldn’t recognize.

You don’t have to maintain continuity with who you’ve been. You don’t have to be loyal to past versions of yourself who made plans for your future. You don’t have to become who you thought you’d be just because a previous version of you worked toward that.

The person you were at twenty was doing their best with who they were and what they knew. But you’re not twenty anymore. You know more now. You’ve learned things that change everything. You’ve become someone different, and that’s not only okay—it’s necessary.

Growth isn’t linear progress toward being more of the same thing. It’s becoming genuinely different people as you learn and experience and evolve. And that process requires letting old versions die, grieving them a bit, honoring what they gave you, and moving forward as whoever you’re becoming now.

You’ll look back at current you someday and barely recognize this person. The things you care about now will seem strange to future you. The person you’re working so hard to become might not be who you actually become. And that’s all part of the process of being human across time.

So be whoever you’re becoming. Let past versions of yourself be who they were—real and valid and doing their best. But don’t be constrained by loyalty to them. Don’t maintain identities that don’t fit anymore. Don’t keep promises made by people you’re not anymore to futures that aren’t your future now.

You contain all the people you’ve been. You carry traces of them, learned from them, built on what they created. But you’re not them anymore. You’re someone new, still changing, still becoming someone you can’t quite see yet.

And that’s the strange, beautiful reality of having one life but being multiple people. Of looking back at past selves with recognition and distance. Of knowing you’re continuously you while also being genuinely different.

The people you’re not anymore made you possible. Honor them for that. But don’t feel obligated to keep being them.

You’re someone new now. And someday you’ll be someone new again. And all of those people are you, genuinely and completely, even though they’re different from each other.

That’s not a problem to solve. It’s just what it means to live a life across time, to grow and change and become while still somehow remaining yourself.

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