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Comment by phs318u | Hacker News Reader

For me the interesting part of this article was the author discovering that he barely recognised his old self. I wonder how common this is? When I reflect on myself, I have a notion that there's a kind of continuity to my ego over the years that - despite the changes in the intervening years - I would recognise. But I'm not a diary writer nor do I have a stack of old disks from a distant part of my personal history, so I can't confirm either way.

Has anybody else experienced what this author describes?

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I have written quite a bit over the years. And some cartooning. I feel amazingly in tune with my fourty years younger teenage self.

Its easy to check, just go to gmail and rewind to first emails you ever sent.

Your comment makes me smile :) I was 49 when it was released from Beta. Luckily i kept a journal for most of my twenties. I am making a concerted effort to get back in the habit now. It is great fun to see what my concerns and day to day events were 25 years ago.

Welcome to my age range :)

Yes, Gmail is one of those recent things. Google is one of those recent things.

Though that is not my reason for using neither.

I did that once and felt really creepy reading emails from my 16 year old self. Like I was intruding on a different child.

Not really. I'm somewhat less of a twit (I think) than I was ten or twenty or thirty years ago, I've learned more, and a lot of my opinions have changed, but I can go back and reread old high school essays and not find them particularly embarrassing - not up to the standard I require of myself now, to be sure, but not so poor as to be unrecognizable, especially after 10th grade honors English under a teacher who regarded errors of grammar and usage the way a Puritan parson regards sin, and who used not wholly dissimilar methods in their extirpation.

Coincidentally, I was going through my Amazon "Wish List" this morning and, as it turns out, I have items I added going back to 2002.

It was definitely a trip seeing what I added over the years.

...Ah, yes, that was my pepper phase...

I've had this experience a couple of times reading source code. Thinking to myself "this stuff is pretty crafty, I wonder who wrote it?". I check revision control metadata and discover who wrote it : me.

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