Children Are Different People

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I find it fascinating that people think of children as earlier versions of themselves.

To me they’re just different people.

Perhaps we should define some things. I think that for someone to be “you”, they need to be extraordinarily similar to you as you are today.

Maybe other people were like that when they were kids. I was not.

One helpful metric might be knowing what that person would have thought about certain things.

I have zero idea what I would have thought about any given topic when I was a kid. Except maybe the taste of boogers and how it feels to skin one’s knee.

We have this problem as adults as well. If you lose your memory, or other mental faculties, you in many ways cease being yourself.

And truthfully, we wake up as a different person each day—having forgotten things and learned others during our rest.

But those changes are incremental enough that we consider ourselves the same in the morning.

Not so with ourselves as kids.

Not for me anyway.

You?

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