That Ship Has Sailed
If you paid attention in your intro philosophy class (or for the Stitcher types, if you listen to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast), you may have heard of the Ship of Theseus. Also known as Theseus’ Paradox, the ship represents a philosophical game — if there’s a ship, but if that ship has all of its boards replaced individually, over time, once every board is replaced, does it remain the same ship?
I remember learning about this as an eighteen year-old in a college intro to ethics class. At the time, I thought it was one of those fun road trip questions — the type of thing that you could argue about just for the hell of it, but something that had pretty much no real world basis. Again, I was eighteen, so I was a certified idiot. There’s also a 45% chance I was hungover.
In class, we were applying the ship of theseus to personal identity. The genius that I thought I was argued against the idea of a more malleable identity. Sure, I didn’t want to go to Toys R Us as badly as the five year old version of myself, but fundamentally, wasn’t I obviously the same person? My tastes, goals, and desires had evolved, but only because that’s what age necessitates. I was the same person operating along the same “track” — go to high school, go to college, get a job, have a family, get way too into youth soccer, somehow save money for college tuition, not vote for the school budget, die. That core would always be there.
About a decade later, I’ve been rethinking my answer. Mostly what I’m grappling with is that I think there’s a major difference between passively functioning within the value system that has been built around you* versus figuring out what your value system actually is. The latter, an evolution of personal identity, can be a relatively painful mental process that forces you to rip up the planks of your ship and gradually replace them with new ones.**
In today’s times, I don’t think this personal shipbuilding really happens for most people until:
· When one is confronted with a major tragedy where one can no longer be emotionally dependent on a parent, family member, or loved one that has guided them through childhood, adolescence, and/or young adulthood
· A traumatic event that contradicts one’s pre-established worldview, and thus forces major reassessment
· One becomes financially independent
I was very fortunate and had no real traumatic young adult experience. But when I was about 23, around the same time I became financially independent, I started reading a lot of books. I was starting to notice some inconsistencies between things I was told, taught, and had simply accepted as truth, and what I was actually observing in the world. Books seemed to have answers, and books begat more books.
Books have nearly literally saved my life, but that seems like another story for another day, and I don’t want to turn this into a bragging session about how I read books. The point I’m trying to make here is that exposure to concrete ideas outside one’s pre-established worldview (which for me, primarily happened through a lot of reading as well as experiences in the world), prompt people to replace rotting planks of their ship with new planks, new ideas, and new perspectives that are going to guide them for the next leg of the voyage.
Although “renovating your ship” seems essential to personal growth, confronting the cognitive dissonance that comes along with it can be painful. On a personal level, sometimes I’ll come across an old article or social media post I wrote, spiral into a vortex of extreme anxiety, and come out wanting to punch that guy in the face. (Then I remember 22 year-old me is in better physical shape than current me, and would probably win in a fight.)
In the scope of past and present identities, my problems are pretty minimal as they relate to the external world — mostly things I wish I never said and wrote, and ideas I wish I never disseminated into the world. For some, past identities can be exponentially more crippling. The lingering mental and practical stigmas of the criminal justice system come to mind, as do arbitrary instances of public shaming. In both these cases, individuals seem to become outsizedly defined by something that they might no longer have anything to do with from a personal identity standpoint — oftentimes it seems like our society is more interested in judging and defining some people entirely by their past selves, rather than the current iteration that may have successfully confronted, acknowledged, or paid for that flaw or mistake that others refer to them by, which can limit their future opportunities and prevent people from becoming their best selves.
I think of the Right to Be Forgotten idea that’s been introduced in Europe, and find it attractive from a mental health standpoint — particularly as the internet threatens to become everyone’s People Don’t Forget kid from high school. Then again, discomfort is probably essential for personal growth, and not confronting things you don’t like about yourself probably isn’t a great solution either.***
Hmm. What’s interesting, and one of the great gifts of life, is that we get to keep exploring stuff like this. In the meantime, I look forward to absolutely hating this article in a few years from now, when I’ve got some fresh new planks.
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*E.g., your upbringing and the world value systems that were in place for your childhood and adolescence, which as history has shown, are not fixed. I think “millennials” are struggling with this mightily, especially given many of us were taught that the end of the Cold War meant the triumph of stable liberal capitalist democracy, and yay everything is great, and that history was over.
**Or so I think. Disclaimer that I am a random person who thinks about this stuff, but quite possibly may have no idea what I’m talking about.
*** Not to mention that in the case of The Right to Be Forgotten, changing search results is in a sense rewriting history, which on a macro level, seems like a potentially horrible idea.
