I-dent-i-don’t

All right, it is June. It is summer. I want to talk about identity. Full disclosure: this article is going to get weird (or interesting, depending on your perspective), and it’s probably going to read a little more like sci-fi than… well… a post on a Substack about money. Just go with me; my current self believes at least one of your future selves will be delighted.

The reality is that people have been wrestling with the concept of identity for a very long time. At the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where individuals once went to consult the Oracle for advice, the words at the entrance reportedly read: “Know thyself.” Many of us today—myself included—have probably interpreted this maxim as a call to introspection, self-awareness, or recognition of one’s own limits. While that may be the case today, it’s likely that the phrase meant something a little different in its original context than it does now.

What “know thyself” may have meant when it was originally inscribed comes into clearer focus through the work of Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher who believed that everything is in flux, with no permanence. (Yes, he’s the “you can’t step in the same river twice,” guy from one of my earlier articles.) Charles H. Kahn, a leading classicist, points to Heraclitus’s writing as the earliest literary reference to this maxim. He asserts that, for Heraclitus, “know thyself” is related to the virtue of sophrosyne, or soundness of mind. And Kahn goes a step further by connecting this concept to the cosmos, writing that, “the deepest structure of the self will be recognized as co-extensive with the universe in general and the political community… so true self-knowledge will coincide with knowledge of the cosmic order and true self-assertion.”

So, what does it mean to know yourself? Can you know yourself if the self is indeed as vast as the cosmic order? Can we truly know ourselves if who we are is, as Heraclitus posited, always in flux? Can we always be the best of ourselves if we serve various—and sometimes competing—interests? And who exactly are we referring to when we say “I”?

When you look back at your past self from ten years ago, is that earlier version of past-you the same person as the current-you reading this now? Let’s go the other way. When current-you looks ahead ten years, is future-you really the same person as current-you… just older? Chances are, you can recognize a big difference between your past self and your current one, but you might imagine a future self that looks a lot like the person you are now. That pattern is part of what psychologists call the end-of-history illusion: the common tendency to acknowledge how much we have changed over time while underestimating how much we will change in the future. In other words, current-you can easily look back at past-you and realize, Wow! I was a totally different person back then. Yet, at the same time, current-you still assumes that future-you will be more or less the same person you are right now.

Said more succinctly, we may be able to accept how much we have changed over time, but we have a very hard time imagining how much we will continue to change. Dan Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist who introduced the idea of the end-of-history illusion (Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson 2013), said it far more eloquently: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

My goal for this article is to talk about the through line between our past, present, and future identities, as well as the idea that even in the present, there may be a variety of current selves operating all at the same time. Think Harold Ramis’s film Multiplicity, the 1996 comedy starring Michael Keaton about a contractor who clones himself into several copies to better handle different aspects of his work and personal life—but less funny and involving identities with no corporeal form. What would that kind of multiplicity mean? For who we are? For who we want to be?

Perhaps you’re familiar with a more philosophical version of this question of identity that’s been circulating on social media. A while back, my Instagram feed was flooded with versions of the following thought experiment: each person in your life—a friend, spouse, parent, child, coworker, even a barista—knows a different version of you. If you suddenly experienced amnesia, which of those people would you trust to bring “you” back? In my mind, I imagine a room in a house of mirrors, with the reflections of different versions of myself shooting off infinitely in every direction.

As my favorite Walt Whitman quote from “Song of Myself” goes, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” We all contain multitudes. If Heraclitus helps us think about identity as fluid across time, Whitman helps us think about it as multiple in the present. We have the capacity to hold contradictions—thoughts, feelings, ideas, identities—in our minds all at once. And maybe, from there, we can ask a slightly different question that brings those two ideas together: with all the swirling motion of our ideas, identities, thoughts, and feelings constantly moving, just like Heraclitus’ river, what if there’s no permanent “I”? What if there are only pieces, signals, murmurs, memories, and déjà vu-like feelings seeping through the sieve of time, connecting each momentary, impermanent self to the next?

One place these impermanent selves become easier to notice is in the ways we use money. What we spend money on from one moment to the next, from one emotional state or identity to another, can offer glimpses of an ever-changing set of values. One moment we are focused on saving for the future; the next, we spend to enjoy the present. Then we switch again to pay for protection, and later burn through it chasing a thrill.

Maybe current-you doesn’t fully buy any of this so far. Still, I think, there’s an argument to be made for the impermanence of identity and the challenge of ever fully knowing oneself.

Socrates believed that knowledge comes from within—that what looks like learning is often a form of remembering what has always been there. He saw questioning as a way of drawing latent knowledge from memory back into awareness. This later became known as the Socratic method; Socrates himself called the process anamnesis, or learning through recollection.

I like the fact that anamnesis and amnesia are opposite concepts rooted in the same Greek stem for memory, mneme. If we forget, can we just remember? Can remembering happen only if we first forget?

Speaking of words and memory, reading Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears—a great book about consciousness—reminded me how annoying it is to forget a word. In his book, Pollan talks about William James, the American psychologist and philosopher who studied, among other things, stream of consciousness. In his work on consciousness, James described how it feels to forget a word or name and have it just out of reach, on the tip of your tongue. He calls this state an “active gap.” We are conscious, we are searching, we feel ourselves on the verge of remembering. The word is right there, yet not there, hovering like a “ghost.” Stranger still, James notes that we’re often able to identify what the missing word is not. That ability to circle around the word without naming it—no, it’s not Tom, not fiddle—almost feels like a second consciousness: we know what it’s not, yet still cannot say what it is. James calls this a “mild torment” (which, as a writer, I’ve felt). He also writes about the relief that comes when we finally remember the word (and as a writer, I’ve also felt).

We know, but we don’t know. Until we remember that we know.

And maybe that strange active-gap state suggests why remembering can feel less like retrieval and more like reception, kind of like tuning a radio receiver. Turn the dial, and different shows or songs come in. Turn it the other way, and different memories come in. There is a branch of research that suggests consciousness exists outside the body—that our brains do not generate it so much as tune into it or filter it in from a universal field. This is known as the field theory of consciousness (Berke 2025). In this view, consciousness isn’t localized in any particular place in the body, the way memory is often associated with the hippocampus, but is instead a fundamental, nonlocal field in the universe that certain parts of the brain and body can access.

This theory of nonlocal consciousness (and there are a few of them) is one I really like reading about, and because it can’t yet be unproven (or proven) as of yet, so I get to let my mind wander. It’s fun to consider what it might mean, and how it might explain some of the strange things we think, feel, see, and do.

The idea of all of us swimming in a kind of “consciousness soup” also makes me think about impermanence. Not just the impermanence of “I,” but also the possibility of something unifying underneath it all. If there is no fixed “I,” then maybe there are fewer barriers between “you” and “me.” Maybe we are all just tapping into different frequencies of something much larger that connects us.

If all of this sounds really abstract, there’s also a more physical—albeit stranger—version of the same question: What survives the biological transformation of metamorphosis, a.k.a. brain liquefaction?

When caterpillars become moths, their brains and bodies undergo a dramatic rewiring. Inside the chrysalis, many larval tissues break down and liquefy, reforming themselves into organizing structures that follow an internal blueprint and guide the moth’s development. But here is where it gets very strange: there are learned associations that aren’t essential to the physical transformation that still survive the transition from caterpillar to moth, reappearing in the moth via memory.

I don’t know how memory survives metamorphosis, but there’s evidence that something does. A Georgetown research study examined whether learned associations could persist through the extreme physical restructuring caterpillars undergo as they become moths (Blackiston, Casey, and Weiss 2008). These researchers trained caterpillars to associate a particular smell with a mild electric shock. After metamorphosis, the adult moths still avoided the smell.

Which raises a deeper question: what exactly is being carried across? Does the moth “remember” being a caterpillar—and being zapped—in the same way a person remembers what happened to them yesterday? Or is something else surviving—perhaps a more basic continuity of sensation or nervous-system patterning that persists even through radical physical change? Or does the moth somehow tap into a consciousness field and remember? No one actually knows the answer to that question.

The human version of this may be less dramatic, but it may not be entirely different. Identity is often imagined as something built from memory, yet memory is partial and imperfect—it’s common for our brains to manipulate our memories and even formulate false ones. Reconstruction of memories is fraught, and emotional distortion runs rampant (Luna 2019). Maybe what matters is less about memory itself and more about which memories—true or distorted—still fit into a coherent narrative of self. Some memories pass from the past-self to the present-self, and some make it further still to the future-self. Others do not.

Whether those memories can ultimately be pieced together into a cohesive personal narrative of the self matters a lot to mental health and wellbeing. Fractured memories or fractured narratives can be associated with trauma, and many therapeutic approaches try to help people gather memories, sensations, feelings, and experiences into a more complete and coherent narrative of the self. But not everything makes it through to the next “healed” version of “I.” Many trauma survivors and people who have been through dramatic transformations say that when they look at a photo of themselves when they were younger, that earlier version of themselves feels like a stranger—almost like a third person. They do not relate to that earlier person; the chain of identity is broken.

We might not liquefy, and we may not tune in and out of certain consciousness frequencies like radios (or do we…), but it is still hard to say that we are the same at all points in time. Narratives help us. Certain memories guide us. And in that ongoing process of loss and continuity, we become the next version of an impermanent self.

There are moments when having more than one way of being in the world is not fragmentation, but a way of enduring. I am not an expert on Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), historically known as multiple personality disorder, and I’m not an expert on the psychology of cults. Yet, these seemingly separate topics point to a similar idea: that a more varied sense of self can sometimes be protective, adaptive, and even necessary for survival.

DID is real. Individuals living with DID may experience multiple identity states with distinct perspectives, preferences, and ways of relating to the world. At times, those identities are aware of one another, and sometimes they’re not. DID is strongly associated with severe trauma, and is believed to develop as a survival response to overwhelming trauma in early childhood. When experiences are too painful to process, the mind may compartmentalize them into separate identity states so the person can continue functioning. Essentially, the psyche reorganizes itself so that the part carrying the trauma and the part navigating daily life don’t have to coexist as one unified self. Said another way, DID can be understood as a way the mind survives what would otherwise be unbearable.

A related version of that same survival strategy often shows up in cult dynamics. Something that can help a person leave a cult is having a more varied sense of self. Cult researcher Steven Hassan, who developed the BITE model of cult mind control, argues that it is crucial for people to retain some memory of self outside the cult. It is hard to leave a cult when one’s entire existence becomes completely wrapped up in the cult: what they do, what they wear, who their friends are, what they think, what they feel.

Helping someone leave a cult often requires reconnecting them with a more varied sense of themselves to help them move forward. Instead of trying to dismantle their entire identity structure all at once, it may be more useful to help them remember the broader world and ways of being they had before joining the cult—their previous behaviors, knowledge, emotions, friends, and hobbies. By helping them separate their cult identity from their pre-cult identity, the person is able to leave the cult without having to start from zero. They’ve reconnected with a pre-cult identity they can return to.

A less extreme version of this same dynamic often shows up in ordinary life transitions: a new baby, a new job, retirement, a health crisis, divorce, or death. During these moments, people often say they feel as if they’ve lost themselves. They need time to cross the liminal threshold between who they were and who they are becoming, and not every part of who they are makes it across to who they will be. Those who get stuck in that threshold, or who have a harder time with the transition, may have fewer selves to draw from as they decide what to carry forward and what to leave behind. A business-owner CEO who has given their life, relationships, and ideas to a company may have a very hard time becoming anything other than a business-owning CEO. We need a well-diversified portfolio of selves – parent, professional, friend, partner, volunteer, hobbyist—to better ride out the turbulence of change.

One therapeutic framework that makes sense of this kind of multiplicity is Internal Family Systems, or IFS. Developed by Richard Schwartz in the 1980s, IFS holds that even healthy, functional people are made up of multiple inner “parts,” or sub-personalities, each with its own perspective, feelings, and motivations. The three most commonly discussed parts are managers, who keep us functional and feeling in control; firefighters, who distract us from or numb pain; and exiles, who hold shame or hurt and are often hidden away. At the core of a person is the Self, a calm, compassionate inner leader who can relate to these parts, help them heal, and guide them. In IFS, the work is to get to know and understand these inner parts, not to ignore, fear, or feel confused by them. In some ways, we become friends with our many selves—and sometimes, friendship is just what people need.

As IFS teaches, friendship isn’t just something we offer outward; it may also be one of the ways we come to know ourselves better. Aristotle was big on friendship. In fact, two of the ten books that make up his Nicomachean Ethics are devoted to it. He believed that we don’t just enjoy friends; we need them. Friendship was not, for Aristotle, a nice-to-have. It was essential to flourish in life. More than that, he believed a “virtuous” friend—the highest form of friendship—was like a second self (Biss 2009). A true friend wants good for us, shares in our joy and sorrow, and reflects something important about who we are.

Aristotle also connects friendship to self-knowledge, bringing us back to the beginning of this article. Our best friends often tend to be similar to us in some ways and different in others. They become a kind of mirror. Being a good friend requires some knowledge of oneself, but friendship also deepens that knowledge in return, helping us become the best versions of ourselves. Through it, we give, receive, learn, and remember with one another.

Interestingly, this concept is also supported by modern researchers: Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz (2023) collected data for Harvard’s longitudinal research survey on adult development, concluding that friends truly heal us and keep us healthy. Could it be that our friends are the ones who help pull us from one liminal space of identity and change into the next? Do friends help us recall the best parts about ourselves—and are those the parts that most often get carried forward?

And maybe this is part of what makes a financial professional so valuable—or even just having someone to talk with about money. So many of life’s transitions also come with moments when money is suddenly in motion. And money is never just money. It’s a social contract; we all agree, for some odd reason, that this little colorful piece of paper means something. Heraclitus believed, of course, that we have an inner life forever changing, but that it always plays out in a social life that is also changing around us. We think for ourselves, but we also think with others. Our financial decisions, some of the most important ones that we make both personally and socially, are no different.

Remember earlier in this article, roughly 2,500 words ago, when I asked who you would trust to bring “you” back if you lost your memory? What if we tried to piece some of that together by looking at your money?

I remember hearing Carl Richards once say something like, “What job are you giving money to do that it was never intended to do?” In other words, what identity or attributes are we trying to assign to this colorful paper, and what does that say about us?

Money and identity are entangled. Sometimes that is good. Sometimes it’s really bad. Mostly, I think, it is something that deserves our attention, conversation, and thought. And it’s okay if we have to have that conversation again and again, because we keep changing.

So I ask you now—and you should ask yourself again:

• What do you think your money would say about your identity, or the identity you give to it?

• What would your credit card statement reveal about who you are, or who you want to be seen as?

• What might your credit history or budget disclose about who you were and where you are going?

And maybe at this point you would answer, “Who cares! I am impermanent. I am change.” And maybe there is some truth in that. But I wouldn’t stop there.

Even if the self is impermanent, there is still real value in searching for it again and again—in thinking through your thoughts, feelings, ideas, and the ways they change over time. Who you are and what you want is just as interesting as who you were and who you will become. We might never truly know ourselves, but we can still be curious about ourselves, work to improve ourselves, and want more or something different for ourselves.

To me, impermanence is freedom and a connection to something larger. And I hope one of your current selves thinks so, too.

Thank you to my editor and friend, Erica Mito! My past-self would not have been brave enough to put these thoughts into the world without your encouragement.

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