How Identity Ages

Although not the main point of the article, this stood out to me:

>>It’s a story you’ve got about how you came to be, who you are, and where your life’s going...Narrative identity is just as much about how you imagine the future, even though it hasn’t happened yet, as it is about how you reconstruct the past. If I’m planning to be president of the United States, and I’m currently laboring in academia, well you’re going to have to develop a way to connect up your past with your goals for the future.

Having recently past my 47th birthday, I’ve come to realize how important is the notion of building a “narrative identity”.

It’s one piece of advice I’d love to give my younger self, and am starting to gratuitously give to younger people I speak with – come up with a narrative you wish to be the story of your life, and then day in, day out, lay down the bricks that will build that narrative into a reality. Be aware of the connections you need to build now, which will become your past, to what you want in the future.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. said Annie Dillard. Each decision you make, each project you start, each job you take – think of how it will impact the narrative you wish to build. Be deliberate about it. The small things you do each day, taken in aggregate, is what your life will be. Just like when kids make designs in freshly fallen snow, at the end of all your tramping, there will be a sketch, a print. Make sure it’s one you’d want.

I don't think it's right to say that people "just forget the negative stuff". To me, the difference in getting older is that I can assign meaning to my suffering. Whet you're suffering as a kid, it seems pointless and painful. As you get older, you have time to see others experience pain and also play through enough hypothetical scenarios that you can find meaning in your own suffering. This, I believe, is one of the secrets to being happy. It is why we often hear stories of resilient cancer survivors and mountaineers who never gave up. Finding purpose and meaning in your suffering is what makes it bearable. This is also a compelling argument for the merits of religion.

I don't think people "forget" pain. They just earn a perspective on the pain that doesn't cause them pain. Usually this perspective includes some link to the present in opposition to a potentially worse outcome which makes the past sound rosier to an outsider.

Tangential point: you don't always get credit for toking things seriously, but you do always get credit (in one form or another) for being lighthearted, and these two things are not orthogonal. I believe this is also why our narratives shift.