The self is the story we tell to piece together who we are and who we were, turning the flux of personality into a narrative structure that becomes more complex with each retelling. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: “If we are creatures of time, we would be better able to do things properly. Yet we do not do that. We meet at points, like points, and promise each other times, denying our moment, denying that time is the measure of change. In fact, the person who makes decisions at a certain time and the person who lives with their consequences throughout the life span, the one who makes promises and keeps them or breaks them, is never the same person. Knowing this about yourself is the beginning of mercy. Accepting each other is one of the kindest things, the most loving things we can do.
Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) was only nineteen years old when she answered this question with unusual clarity in her diary, which was later published as endlessly satisfying. Diary of a Philosophy Student (public library).
Between making his decisions about a life worth living and thinking about how two souls can work together in friendship and love, he sees that the “true man” is found through the interaction between free will and the constraints of the situation. But because circumstances are constantly changing and choices are dynamic processes rather than static products of the will, the self is a mobile entity. You write:
The choice is not made, but it is always made; it is repeated every time I notice.
Noting the “great hatred of love, the incorrigible pride, the sorrow that provokes passion, the abuse” that can destroy all love if we do not fight them with “great compassion and mercy,” he considers compassion for change—for yourself and for the other—essential to love but unknown to marriage:
The horror of the final decision is that it involves not only today's self but also tomorrow's. And this is why marriage is fundamentally immoral. Therefore, we should try to find out which one repeats our changing situation more often. One has to do some kind of self-reflection and say to oneself: this is the situation I find myself in a lot; this is what I want most often; therefore, this is what suits me.
You're already familiar with one of the pangs of regret — that punishing desire for a past self to make decisions that fit the values and needs of the present — you decide:
No, it has no sympathy for my past. Live in the present. Good enough if I know what to do.
Couple that with Adam Phillips on a call to self-reflection and the courage to change your mind, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir about how chance and choice combine to make us who we are.
