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For me the interesting part of this article was the author discovering that he barely recognised his old self. I wonder how common this is? When I reflect on my
by phs318u 9y ago
For me the interesting part of this article was the author discovering that he barely recognised his old self. I wonder how common this is? When I reflect on myself, I have a notion that there's a kind of continuity to my ego over the years that - despite the changes in the intervening years - I would recognise. But I'm not a diary writer nor do I have a stack of old disks from a distant part of my personal history, so I can't confirm either way.
Has anybody else experienced what this author describes?
- interfixus 9y agoI have written quite a bit over the years. And some cartooning. I feel amazingly in tune with my fourty years younger teenage self.
- kodisha 9y agoIts easy to check, just go to gmail and rewind to first emails you ever sent.
- zafka 9y agoYour comment makes me smile :) I was 49 when it was released from Beta. Luckily i kept a journal for most of my twenties. I am making a concerted effort to get back in the habit now. It is great fun to see what my concerns and day to day events were 25 years ago.
- interfixus 9y agoWelcome to my age range :) Yes, Gmail is one of those recent things. Google is one of those recent things. Though that is not my reason for using neither.
- slededit 9y agoI did that once and felt really creepy reading emails from my 16 year old self. Like I was intruding on a different child.
- throwanem 9y agoNot really. I'm somewhat less of a twit (I think) than I was ten or twenty or thirty years ago, I've learned more, and a lot of my opinions have changed, but I can go back and reread old high school essays and not find them particularly embarrassing - not up to the standard I require of myself now, to be sure, but not so poor as to be unrecognizable, especially after 10th grade honors English under a teacher who regarded errors of grammar and usage the way a Puritan parson regards sin, and who used not wholly dissimilar methods in their extirpation.
- JKCalhoun 9y agoCoincidentally, I was going through my Amazon "Wish List" this morning and, as it turns out, I have items I added going back to 2002. It was definitely a trip seeing what I added over the years. ...Ah, yes, that was my pepper phase...
- dboreham 9y agoI've had this experience a couple of times reading source code. Thinking to myself "this stuff is pretty crafty, I wonder who wrote it?". I check revision control metadata and discover who wrote it : me.