Shower Thoughts

Shower thoughts seem to come to me unbidden, like door-to-door salesmen of the subconscious.  They are always apropos of nothing, as if my mind is so horrified at the tactile reality of scrubbing my dad bod that it desperately wants to distract me.

Today, my mind made itself known mid-ablution with the (somewhat inaccurate) idea that your body furnishes itself with a new set of cells every seven years.  It’s an arresting thought, but if I’m a new me every seven years, why does this new me feel so tired all the time?

So the idea runs roughly like this.  Your body has trillions of cells and each of those different types of cells have different lifespans, dying off and being regenerated.  The rates vary wildly.  Skin cells are a couple of weeks, white blood cells live a bit more than a year.  The mighty swimmers from our testes have a life span of about three days.

The reason I wrote above that it’s a somewhat inaccurate idea is because some cells – notably the neurons in our brains – die off and are not regenerated.  You have a compliment of about 86 billion neurons, and when they go, they go.

I’ve never found out where the figure of seven years comes from, I think it’s the average age of cells in any adult human body at any given time.  Still, my shower thought was more interested in the meme-friendly inspirational quote-generating idea that you are not you, biologically, every seven years.  You’re a new you.

We are all, in some way, the Ship of Theseus.

As always, shower thought begets shower thought.

A lot can happen in seven years.

My oldest child is not even six years old.  The previous biological me was childless.

As of 16^th October this year, I would (by one day) no longer biologically be the man who stood in front of our families and married my wife.

In fact, anyone I had romantic dalliances with pre-meeting my wife is biologically very, very dead.

People I worked with in my old job worked with a ghost.

Some of the friends I have today have potentially known 3-4 versions of me.

Shower thought begets shower thought.

If we are a new human being roughly every seven years, where does identity come from? 

I mean, as I look in the mirror now just over a month from the end of my fortieth year of life, I don’t look much like the ‘me’ I see in photographs from my teens.  But I remember a lot of my teens, and even remember some of the incidents in those photographs even though, technically, they happened to someone else. I equally ‘remember’ a lot of stories about previous versions of me who were very drunk, even if I don’t remember the events themselves.

Is our sense of self just a combination of things that we – and largely only we, the individual – remember?  We’re just a bunch of recordings that we call to light when we need a way to react.  What did I do last time this happened?  Have I ever experienced this?  A collection of files and cross-references that we call our opinions.  We exist only because we remember us from yesterday, or ten years ago. 

What we call ‘me’ is just a story you tell yourself every day.

Shower thought begets shower thought.

If we are just stories, then our children (and maybe our grandchildren) are partly how our story continues after our death.  But instead of the grand lifelong saga we remember, they’ll reduce us to a series of anecdotes.  ‘Oh, he always loved that.’  ‘Remember the time mum tried to skateboard?’  They tell their version of your life story, truncated, and like Chinese Whispers it gets mis-told and lost in translation. 

It’s moot anyway, because within two or three generations, your story dies out with your descendants.  Childless couples may live on in the memories of extended family or friends, but their story dies out sooner.

Unless you’re famous enough to have deeds that live beyond your life, your story is short.  And even if you’re a someone, for good or for ill, who has statues erected to them, or you achieve the immortality of your own Wikipedia page, you still fade.  How many young people today are Googling Harold Lloyd?  Sammy Davis Jr? Scipio Africanus? There is a famous equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow, but it’s far more famous as ‘that statue with the traffic cone on its head’.  I honestly don’t think many people care who that statue is: it’s more famous for what it’s story has become.

So yeah . . . shower thoughts.