Skin changer

It is a condition of our species that we all have more than one personality.

The difference is that (for those of us who do not have multiple personality disorder) we cycle through our personalities fairly slowly.

I'm not talking about the facets of your current personality (for those of you who are saying 'wait, who I am at work is not who I am at home is not who I am with my lover is not who I am...' etc).

Let me put it this way.

Who were you seven years ago?

Think back, don't just answer "I was the same as I was today"...  If that's truly the case then you're probably either lying to yourself or you lead an exceedingly dull and sheltered life.

Honestly, try to remember who you were, what you did, what was important. 
Remember the heartaches, the loves and the petty arguments.
Remember the political strife, whatever was bothering you. 
Remember how you interacted with your fellow humans. 
Try to remember each and every political view you held then, every social belief, every moral.  Can you remember them?  Are they the same?   It was just seven years ago, it shouldn't be that difficult.

Can you do it?

I can, sort of.  But the things I remember seem alien to me now.  Life has happened in the interim, and I am nowhere near being the same person I was then...  I am a new and different personality.  All of the people I know now who I also knew then are whole new personalities (to say nothing of the ones who have entered or left or passed through or glanced off of my sphere awareness in that time frame) We have all been shaped by our lives, our interactions, and the endless coming and going of existence.

If I go back another seven I find I can barely remember that person, and they are utterly and totally alien.

If I go back an additional seven I find yet another stranger, more energetic and more optimistic but with almost nothing in common with the person sitting at this computer today.

I could choose to use any increment of time for this exercise, but I think seven is a good choice...  Not quite a decade.  Just far enough back to be difficult to remember.

We are all skin changers.

Each of us a constantly drifting and evolving personality.

We can't stop, we don't dare.  The world changes and we are part of the world... 

I think that's a part of why folks take so many pictures.  Like folks who hoard junk because it's tied to special memories, something they want to hold on to, something they've promised themselves they will never forget.  But it's all transient in the end.  The memories fade, and we're left with that ever present, familiar and terrifying emptiness.  The hole where our life use to be, which we try to fill with whatever is handy. 

We are a nation of quick fix addicts.  Incapable of making lasting connections because life demands that we change so quickly and so regularly that we can never keep the good things around for long.  So we search for the quick fix, the work-around. 

We fill our lives with noise, cheap entertainment, cheap thrills.

We take too many pictures, enshrine every possible moment in video form.

We acquire the latest goods, the latest gadgets.

The fire and forget relationships and the single use friends who fill the endless terabytes of our various storage systems. 

All those precious moments we swore that we would remember forever...

Which we will experience once, remember for a time, and never pick up again.






Our species is dying.

It has very little to do with environmental damage or climate change or extremist thought or our general disregard for our own welfare, or the welfare of those around us...

Those are just symptoms.

We are dying because we are forgetting.

As a species we are forgetting who we were as a species, and more importantly who we wanted to be.
We may have our 'history', but we have viscerally forgotten what it was like to be the folks we claim to come from.

Buried in our junk and our useless mementos, we are fading into that rest-home oblivion of eventual stagnation and forgetfulness from whence we will not, in my opinion, return.