Who are you when you’re not looking?

For those lured to TU Delft by the cherry blossoms, your time has come. And just as quickly, it passed. Spring is nature’s announcement that change is inevitable. Not just around you: the brimming flowerbeds, the shifting light, the waxing and waning of birdsong, but inside you too. Spring, more so than any other season, shows that nothing is fixed. Not even you.

Which brings me to the question that has long unsettled philosophers and laymen alike: if nothing is permanent, what about the self?

You might say yes, you have changed – hairstyles, habits, heartbreaks – but there’s still the thread of ‘you’ woven within every iteration. For example, the tantrums you threw as a toddler are proof of your adult ambition to headline at the opera. A line can be drawn and a self mapped.

But what if that continuity is a trick of the mind?

But what if that continuity is a trick of the mind? What if the self is just the story we tell ourselves, stitched together from random slices of time?

The Apple TV show Severance compels its audience to confront exactly these questions. In it, severed workers undergo a brain procedure that creates two consciousnesses: the ‘innie’ who exists only at work and the ‘outie’ who lives free of any memory of the office. One self suffers so the other does not have to. It’s marketed as the perfect ‘work-life balance’ and may sound intriguing, but it poses a more disturbing question: what are you doing to the versions of yourself you would rather not remember?

And: What are they doing to you?

We don’t need a chip in our brain to split ourselves, we already do it between our various roles, moods, obligations. There’s the self that hides in bed, and the one that runs naked into the sea. There’s the child chasing fairies in the garden, and the adult irritated by bees. There’s the self that has undying faith and the one that will never believe.

We are all made up of contradictions, not because something is broken, but because nothing was ever whole. Buddhism speaks to this, that the continuity of the self is an illusion. That the idea of an enduring ‘I’ is merely an echo chamber of sensations and perceptions, looping just long enough for the sender – or receiver – to feel like a person.

But if the self is an illusion, where the hell do we go from here? To be caught in this liminal space, between who you were and who you’ll become, without the who of it all, is disorientating. But it’s also honest. It’s where contradiction lives. Where possibility breathes. You are not one thing and you never were. And maybe there’s a kind of freedom in that.