a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by sounds_sound
sounds_sound  ·  4341 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why You Won’t Be the Person You Expect to Be

So you're saying that you're the same person now as you were at 15?





kleinbl00  ·  4341 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Plus about five orders of magnitude of happiness, yes.

kurmit  ·  4341 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I think that might not be a fair question, considering the large amount of maturing everyone does in their teenage years. I tend to agree with the article, though. I'd say a certain amount of chagrin for one's past opinions & perspectives is a natural consequence of, well, growth. I certainly hope that I remain somewhat malleable as I age. A counterpoint, in the form of a passage from The Great Gatsby, comes to mind, however:

    I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram — life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

I take from this a sense that too much shifting between opinions, too much effort spent on being fully "open" to new perspectives is, in the end, a fruitless endeavor. I think, as in most things in life, there's a balance to be struck between malleability in one's opinions and the time-cultivated inertia one has to resist great changes.

BLOB_CASTLE  ·  4341 days ago  ·  link  ·  

So you'd say that there is an end to our own growing?