I don’t know how to express or articulate my thoughts and my vocabulary and grammar gets messed up the more I write so I will just write simply.
What I’m trying to say is that every day or hour or minute or everytime you think, you feels like your original selves is dying. I know that we are constantly growing but i just can’t stop thinking that whenever we grow or learning new things or start to think differently, our past selves is dead. I think back to my past selves in middle school, highschool and from 2022 and think, aren’t they dead? No matter what i do or think or whatever happens to me, i can’t bring back the personalities or "me"s from the past. They remain dead and continue to being dead. Unless they are exist in another timeline or universe.
What exactly is identity, consciousness or the self which is me? I don’t know nor understand but this idea just stuck in my mind and occasionally appears when I’m bored, stressed or relaxed.
You’ve probably hit upon a good metaphor for what’s happening.
I believe each time we sleep parts of our personalities are torn down and rebuilt slightly differently.
Whatever the mechanism, you aren’t really the same person you were years ago, you’re a different person with many of the same memories. The “self” is a useful simplification of reality. At the fundamental level, its not possible to define “you” and “not you” at a moment in time, much less across spans of time.
And they aren’t even the same memories. “You” just thinks they are, but every time “you” remembers them they’re slightly different because you don’t remember the facts of the memory only whats important to “you” and “you” is constantly changing.
If therapy has taught us anything, it’s that we can also change and direct that change while conscious. So past you is probably slightly different than now you for any value of past and now.
Now, the only reason I see to feel bad about that is if you leave a worse person in charge than was there before. Focus on self-improvement, and improvement of the world around you, and maybe the end of past you isn’t so bad a thing.