TMI Deep Stuff

What makes you, you?

Did you really come here to read a detailed analysis of philosophy as it pertains to being and identity? Well you're in luck because here I go.

I would argue that there are a number of factors which go into making a person who they are, some nature, some nurture. I wouldn't be who I am if I had a different genome, for instance, but genetics are hardly destiny. Similarly, I am the sum of my experiences and memories, but I'm more than that. Also, if I'm the sum of my memories, am I still affected by something I no longer remember? I would argue yes.

So it seems like it's as simple as: my genome plus the sum of that genome's experiences is what makes me me, but come on, that's both dispassionate, clinical, and totally wrong. That's like saying that the future is predestined and my DNA rides through it like my body is a vehicle for long acid chains. The events of my life are in part dictated by my identity, because they're the result of choices I've made. And my choices are a result both of me and how I was raised and the events which took place leading up to those choices. And how I was raised, like my DNA, is affected by my ancestry, but also by dumb luck.

It's all a circle around a circle, a wheel within a wheel. There's no prototype of me which can be said to exist independent of myself from which I can be said to have progressed. And genetics is seriously complicated by the fact that they've found, more and more, that nurture affects nature too. How well my parents did in life is an intimate part of my genes. Epigenetics is a trip, man.

So, frankly, what makes me me is me. There's no separating the pluribus out of the unum. I am greater than the sum of my parts. That's not a fair answer but it's the only one I can give.

Do you care more about doing the right thing or doing things right?

I think you can't do things right if they're not the right thing, so I guess doing the right thing. I suppose this is supposed to be a rumination on the letter versus the spirit of the law or something, but I think, deep down, you can't do things right if they're wrong things. I suppose you can do wrong things correctly, like being a particularly punctual mass-murderer or something, but I'd argue that at the bottom you're still doing things wrong, just efficiently or whatever.

What is sexual freedom? Do you have it?

Sexual freedom is being completely uninhibited sexually, I guess. So no, even though I may have more than most, I don't have true sexual freedom because we live in a society. We're none of us free until we all are, I guess. But I'm not sure that "sexual freedom" isn't some kind of Platonic ideal we can approach but never actually reach. People are always going to have hangups. I wish we had fewer of them, as a society, but even if we could eliminate those, there would still be individual hangups.

In your romantic relationships, is trust more important than love?

I was going to say that I didn't think you could have love without trust, but frankly, that's not true. I can think of at least one person whom I love and probably always will whom I wouldn't trust further than I could throw them, and they're heavy. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that love without trust is no basis for any healthy relationship, but trust without love isn't terribly romantic. I trust partners. I love lovers. I think I'd like a bit of both, but I think, as I enter my senescence, that I value trust perhaps a bit more highly than romantic love. I don't think you can have a healthy romantic relationship without both, however.

Your life, is it more of a dream or a nightmare?

Neither; it's one of those dreams where you bore yourself awake. My life isn't nightmarish for the most part, it's just tedious. I'm not going to claim nightmare status, even on my bad days. I've been very lucky in some ways. But by the same token, my life is hardly what I would call a dream. I'm that dream where you have to find something but you don't know where it is and it keeps changing identity as you look for it, plus your parents are there looking mildly disappointed, and you wake up feeling exhausted, never having found that thing you were looking for, whatever it was.

What is the last romantic thing you did for someone?

I gave Sveta a back rub. We can't afford flowers but we try to keep the romance alive.

That was a nice light answer to end with. I'll leave it there.