Escape the past? Why of course you can’t.

The delusion shouldn’t have been “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” but rather, “Can’t escape the past? Why of course you can!”

One of my friends writes editorials for a newspaper. He showed me one of his most recent drafts, which drew parallels between Kim Jong Un and himself. Of course, he is not a dictator’s son, but they were both born into a “family business” and there is a tension between his family’s interest (the business, conservative ways) and his own (hippie communes, intellectualism, liberal free love). And the more he grows up, the more he realizes that home and family is closer after all.

After reading his draft, I felt profoundly disturbed. The point of his editorial was to humanize Kim Jong Un. However, that wasn’t the point for me. The point for me was: can we escape our past?

Before I graduated from college, I felt that the past was no big deal. And even now, I don’t believe that the past is destiny.

But recently, I’ve been thinking about how the past does matter—in ways that we may not even consciously realize. Although the past is not destiny, it gives you a starting framework.

I realized that it was not just that he (a different he) had made his career choice not just himself, but it was also for his family.

The expression is “in his blood” but I don’t think it’s a blood/genes thing, it’s an environment/cultural thing. It’s how your family’s attitudes shaped you.

For my family, that attitude has always been curiosity and process driven—combined with their concrete dealings in technology, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that I want to build things, even though I always thought that I came to that conclusion myself (much like how I was disappointed to find out I wasn’t the first person to come up with the concept of reincarnation in the fourth grade).

One of our last conversations was about marriage.

We talked about how important it was to marry someone who understood your family and vice versa.

These were topics that wouldn’t have ever crossed my mind at seventeen. Wildly idealistic, wildly optimistic, wildly exciting, all you need is love. But things are different now. You know more. You feel responsibility—to yourself, to your family, which becomes yourself.

You want a different kind of love.

So how do you reconcile your environment with yourself? How do you realize the power of the past without letting it crush you?

My gut feeling is that you embrace the parts of the past that you find fundamentally important. But on that foundation, you must maintain a strong and different vision of the future, because history never repeats itself, only rhymes.