Have you ever noticed how we treat our past selves like strangers? We look back at choices we made five years ago—or five months ago—and wonder, What was I thinking?
I felt this acutely last week while clearing out old boxes. I found a letter I'd written to a friend but never sent, full of convictions I no longer hold. Reading it felt like overhearing someone else's conversation. The person who wrote those words is me, technically, but also fundamentally not-me. Every cell in my body has been replaced since then. My knowledge has expanded, my relationships have shifted, my priorities have transformed.
This raises an uncomfortable question about regret: When we regret a past decision, who exactly is doing the regretting? The present self judges the past self by standards the past self couldn't have possessed. We know now what we couldn't have known then. We are different people, equipped with different information, living in different circumstances.