Why are we never quite the same person twice?

When Ray Peat used to do interviews, he was pretty infamous in Peat circles for never introducing himself the same way twice. Whenever he did podcasts and interviews, no matter who they were with, he never gave the same introduction when they asked him to tell them about himself. There was never an elevator pitch. He went all over the place: he’d be a painter, a philosopher, he’d talk about literature and linguistics, he’d focus on his teaching, on biology, physiology, metabolism, politics, all sorts of things. He never really saw himself as one thing.

He actually described this from his childhood. Quoting him here, he says: “When I was three years old, helping my father with a repetitive task, I realised that every time I repeated the task, I was a new person. And ever since then, I’ve never been able to have the illusion of doing something twice.”

That’s really one of the core ideas running through his whole philosophy. He didn’t see a person as a fixed object. You don’t have a fixed, permanent identity. You’re a living organism, continually changed by what happens to you. That means even your past can take on a different meaning as you change through time. Changing your mind and changing your perspective is a core part of being an organism. You’re never fixed.

And, as I talk about a lot, he links that capacity, a capacity for novelty, to energy. Low energy, he thinks, pushes you towards clichés. You want ready-made answers that you can just pull off the shelf and repeat without having to think about them too much, because you’re lacking that energy. Higher energy makes original thought and original expression far more possible. When you’ve got more energy, you don’t have to keep falling back on those ready-made patterns. You can improvise, bob and weave, think on the spot.

So that’s an interesting thing to consider in your own world: how you tend to describe yourself, introduce yourself, and think about your life as an organism. Do you get stuck in fixed patterns? Or are you someone who’s very improvisational, very off the cuff, constantly changing and becoming something different every day?

Say something happened to you ten years ago. The event itself, what actually happened, hasn’t changed, but the organism remembering it has. You’ve learned things, done things, met people, been places, changed your priorities. Where the event sits in your life can shift too. That’s how Peat tended to narrate his own life. He was never a simple specialist in anything. His past might have been fixed, but what it meant was still moving, always. To quote Peat: “You try to picture overarching series of meanings so that everything can get into a better future.”

Lightly tidied for reading. The quotations are from the translations named below.