Blog

"Nature or nurture?"

It's an age old question. What really determines who we are? Is it our parents or how we were raised?

If you call someone a 'bad apple' enough times, will they begin to believe it? More importantly, will they begin to behave in line with your expectations? Or, on the flip side, will their inherent personality triumph over the misnomer?

Here's a subtle twist. What if we are all 'bad apples'? What about if we all carry around inside us seeds of evil but they are deeply buried behind walls of willpower, senses of propriety and societal constraints. Then, when the precisely right circumstances present themselves, when we are at our weakest, the seeds rapidly flourish and manifest themselves. Then what?

Having the seeds of evil doesn't make us evil, does it? If we are completely oblivious to their existence we certainly can't be held accountable for them? I mean, absent those right circumstances, you are an upstanding member of the community. You can't be considered evil. No way!

But the seeds were there. They were always there, just waiting for the right conditions.

"You are the sum of all your precious experiences."

This story grew out of that quote. I wanted to explore the idea of identity. Who are you? As in, what makes up who you are? Is it your body, your memories, your parents or your genetics?

For this story, I decided your memories make up the majority of your identity. Supposing this is true, then how much can you forget before you stop being yourself? I have forgotten many people, events and experiences throughout my life. With each loss, did I, in some infinitesimal way, stop being myself? Maybe after the memory loss, I was a new person. A person that was less because of the subtraction of a past experience but more because of the addition of the new experience of now. Was it a wash? Are all new experiences just as valuable as all the old ones that are forgotten?

Maybe we are a sort of time traveler moving through the timeline of the Universe. Old memories drop of while new ones come in. We move on through life, blissfully unaware that at each instant we are a new person simply due to forgetting. Only in retrospect, many years from now, when you look back and remember who you were, does the aggregate changes to your personality caused by those tiny lost memories become apparent.

That's sad in a way. "I am who I am today because of what I have forgotten." Your experiences are treasures but you can't keep all of them. No, you can't! You have to make room for more. You just can't remember everything that has happened to you. The new stuff has a place. The old stuff has to go.

What about people who suffer from Alzheimer's or dementia? Are they still themselves? They don't behave like their old selves but going back to the concept of change. Maybe they are still themselves, just as a new incarnation with less history.

There's a lady I knew back in college. I can picture her face clearly. I remember talking to her several times. For the life of me, I can't remember her name. I remember remembering her name. I know it was an interesting name and I did remember it for many years. Now? Poof. It's gone. I can't get it back.

I wonder what memory replaced that one of her name? Am I a better person for forgetting her name? Is the new memory more important? More valuable? More importantly, is the 'me' that remembered her name, substantially better or worse than the 'me' that no longer remembers her name?

But wait. Hold on a second. Suppose that I DO remember her name. What then? Do I go back to being the person I was back when I initially remembered or does yet another memory get lost and then replaced with her name?

Deep thought: How much can you forget and still be yourself?