There is a particular relationship that most adults in midlife and beyond are conducting, almost continuously, without quite registering that they are conducting it. The relationship is with the various previous versions of themselves who made the decisions that have produced the life the current self is now living. The previous versions include the person in their thirties who chose the career, the person in their forties who chose the partner, the person in their fifties who chose the house or the city or the various other large structural commitments that have shaped the contours of where the current self has ended up.
The relationship is, on close examination, considerably more consequential than the wider cultural register has been treating it as. The relationship operates continuously, in the small ongoing background commentary the current self is maintaining about the choices the previous selves made. The commentary is, in most cases, critical. The commentary registers, with considerable specificity, the various ways the previous selves got things wrong, made decisions the current self would not have made, and produced the various features of the current life that the current self has been spending considerable energy second-guessing.
What the standard cultural register has not adequately absorbed is that this commentary is, in some real way, the structural mechanism through which the current self maintains a particular kind of unproductive ongoing tension with the life they are currently in. The tension is not, in most cases, dramatic. The tension is, more accurately, the small daily texture of being in a life that the current self has been continuously evaluating as not quite the life the previous selves should have chosen. The accumulated effect is considerable. The accumulated effect is, in some real way, what most of the underexamined low-grade dissatisfaction of midlife adults is structurally produced by.
What the commentary actually consists of
It is worth being precise about what the commentary consists of, because the wider register has not, on the available evidence, developed particularly good vocabulary for it.
The commentary is the small ongoing internal observation that the current self has been making about the previous selves’ decisions. The observations include, in most cases, considerable specificity about what the previous selves should have known. The man in his forties should have known that the career he was choosing would, by the structural design of the industry, produce the particular form of professional exhaustion the current self is now living inside. The woman in her thirties should have known that the partner she was choosing would, by the structural design of who he was, fail to develop into the kind of substantive companion the current self has been wanting across the intervening decades.
The structural feature of these observations is that they are, in most cases, made on the basis of information the previous selves did not, by structural design, have access to. The man in his forties could not, in any meaningful sense, have known what the industry was going to do across the intervening twenty years. The woman in her thirties could not, on the available evidence she had at the time, have known how the partner was going to develop. The previous selves were operating on the information they had. The current self is, in some real way, judging them on the basis of information they could not have had.
The judgment is, by structural design, unfair. The unfairness is not, in most cases, registered by the current self as unfairness. The unfairness is registered, more accurately, as the obvious assessment of the previous selves’ decisions, calibrated to the standard the current self has been operating on without quite noticing that the standard is calibrated to information that was not, at the time, available.
What treating the previous selves as friends would actually involve
The practice the wider register has not adequately developed is the small daily work of treating the previous selves with the same epistemic courtesy the current self would, in principle, extend to any friend in the same position.
The friend in the same position would have been operating on the information they had at the time. The friend in the same position would have been making the decisions that seemed, on the available evidence, the best decisions to make. The friend in the same position would have been doing what the current self can, on close examination, recognize as what the friend was doing. The current self would not, in any meaningful sense, judge the friend on the basis of information the friend did not have.
The previous selves are, structurally, the friend in the same position. The previous selves were operating on the information they had at the time. The previous selves were making the decisions that seemed, on the available evidence, the best decisions to make. The previous selves were doing what they could, with what they had, under the structural conditions that were available to them. The current self is, on close examination, the friend who has been operating on the previous selves’ decisions for the intervening years. The current self has not, in most cases, been extending to the previous selves the same epistemic courtesy that they would, in principle, extend to any other friend in the same position.
The practice involves the small daily work of correcting this. The work involves, in selected moments throughout the day, the small implicit decision to attend to the previous selves’ decisions with the same courtesy the current self would extend to a friend’s. The previous selves did the best they could. The previous selves were operating on the available information. The decisions they made were, on the available information at the time, defensible. The defensibility does not, in any meaningful sense, require the current self to endorse the decisions. The defensibility requires, more modestly, the recognition that the previous selves were doing the work of being a particular person at a particular time with the particular information that was available, and that this work was not, in itself, the failure the current self has been treating it as.
Why the practice is so hard to install
The honest acknowledgment is that the practice is, on close examination, considerably harder to install than the description above makes it sound. The reasons are worth examining.
The first reason is that the commentary serves, in most adults, a structural function the wider register has not adequately registered. The commentary allows the current self to maintain the implicit position that they would, in their current configuration, have made different decisions and accordingly produced a different life. The implicit position is psychologically comfortable. The implicit position protects the current self from the structurally uncomfortable recognition that the life they are currently in is, in some real way, the cumulative product of decisions the previous selves made under conditions the previous selves could not, by structural design, fully understand at the time.
Giving up the commentary accordingly involves the current self in the small structural recognition that the life they are currently in is, more or less, the life that was structurally available given the conditions the previous selves were operating under. The recognition is uncomfortable. The recognition is, on the available evidence, also the structural precondition for the underlying peace the practice is calibrated to produce.
The second reason is that the commentary has, in most adults, become structurally bonded to the apparatus’s sense of being a thoughtful person. The apparatus has been treating the ongoing critical assessment of the previous selves as evidence of the current self’s superior judgment, calibrated to the implicit assumption that recognizing the previous selves’ mistakes is what allows the current self to do better going forward. The assumption is, on close examination, structurally incomplete. The recognizing of mistakes does not, by itself, produce different decisions in the future, because the future decisions will be made under future conditions that are, by structural design, not currently knowable. The recognizing produces, more accurately, the small ongoing self-superiority that the apparatus has been treating as substantive judgment.
The third reason is that the practice requires the current self to extend forgiveness to the previous selves in a structural form that the wider self-help register has tended to romanticize. The actual forgiveness is, on close examination, less dramatic than the wider register’s framing tends to suggest. The actual forgiveness is, more accurately, the small ongoing decision to stop treating the previous selves’ decisions as the subject of ongoing critical commentary, and to start treating them as the structural conditions inside which the current self is conducting their life. The decision is small. The decision is, on the available evidence, considerably more consequential than the small size suggests.
What the practice actually produces
What the practice produces, in the adults who have installed it, is structurally specific. The adults are not, in most cases, suddenly happy with the various features of their current life that the commentary had been calibrated to address. The features remain present. The career is still the career the previous self chose. The partner, if still present, is still the partner. The various structural features of the current life remain structurally what they were before the practice began.
What has changed is, more specifically, the small ongoing internal texture the current self is bringing to the engagement with the current life. The current self has stopped, in some real way, conducting the continuous internal litigation of the previous selves’ decisions. The space the litigation had been occupying has become, more accurately, available for the various other forms of attention the litigation had been crowding out. The current life is, in some real way, more available to be actually lived rather than continuously evaluated against the alternative life the previous selves would, in the current self’s revised counterfactual, have produced.
The cumulative effect is what the wider register has been calling, with considerable imprecision, peace with one’s past. The accurate framing is more specific. The peace is not, in itself, the product of any change in the past. The past is, by structural design, unchangeable. The peace is, more accurately, the structural product of the small daily decision to stop conducting the ongoing critical relationship with the previous selves, and to start conducting the kind of substantively respectful relationship that the previous selves had, on the available evidence of what they were actually doing under the conditions they were operating in, always deserved.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
The relationship with the previous selves is, on close examination, one of the more underexamined relationships of midlife and beyond. The relationship operates continuously in the small ongoing internal commentary the current self has been maintaining about the decisions the previous selves made. The commentary is, in most cases, critical. The commentary is, on the available evidence of how the previous selves were actually operating, also structurally unfair, calibrated to information the previous selves did not have at the time the decisions were being made.
The practice of treating the previous selves with the same epistemic courtesy the current self would extend to any friend in the same position is, in some real way, one of the deeper pieces of internal work available to adults in the second half of life. The practice is small in any single instance. The practice, accumulated across the years following its installation, produces the structural condition that the wider register has been calling peace with one’s past without quite naming the mechanism.
The mechanism is the small daily refusal to litigate the previous selves’ decisions against the standard of information they could not have had. The refusal is small. The refusal is, on the available evidence of the adults who have installed it, what most of the visible internal stability of late adulthood is, in some real way, the structural product of. The wider register would benefit, on the available evidence, from absorbing this with considerably more seriousness than it has so far. The absorbing, modestly, is what articles like this one are calibrated to begin.
