Latest / YINWorldWide / The Person You Were vs. The Person You Became
Transcript
- YIN: Imagine walking into a room and seeing a younger version of yourself sitting down at a table. Not the person you were yesterday or five years ago. The person you were when you were 15 or 16 years old. They're sitting there looking at you, trying to figure out who you've become. They recognize your face, although you look older than they imagined. They notice how you carry yourself, how you speak, maybe even how differently you dress. And after a few moments, they start asking questions. Did we become successful? Did we end up doing what we always said we would? Are we happy? Are our parents okay? Are we still friends with the people we grew up with? Did we end up with the person we thought we would? and suddenly a conversation you thought would be exciting becomes a little bit more difficult. Because some of the questions have answers that you're proud of, others have answers you never imagined having to give. And sitting across from you is someone who doesn't know about the disappointments yet, the heartbreak, the decisions that changed everything, the people who came into your life, and the people who eventually left it. They don't know how much their understanding of the world is going to change. They only know who they are right now and who they believe that they're going to become. But there's something I want you to consider. what if the younger version of you has just as much to teach you as you have to teach them? Because we usually imagine these conversations with the assumption that the older version of ourselves has all the answers. But what if growing older didn't teach you things? What if it also causes you to forget some things worth remembering? This is Yin, and this is a place where we explore identity, direction, and discipline. Not because I believe I have all the answers, but because I believe some of the most important questions in life are the ones we don't spend enough time examining. Today, we're gonna have a meeting between the two versions of you, who you were before life unfolded, and who you became after experiencing it. We're not gonna spend this episode talking about what advice you would give your younger self. We've all heard those conversations. invest earlier, take more chances, don't worry so much about what other people think. Some of that advice is valuable. But I'm more interested in what would happen if the two of you actually had to sit across from each other and explain the lives that you've lived. the younger version of you knows where they hope to go, and the older version knows where the road actually led. Those are two different perspectives, and neither one has the complete picture. Think about who you were when you were 16. try to remember what you genuinely believed your future would look like. Not the version of your childhood you've reconstructed through years of hindsight. What mattered to you then? Maybe you wanted to become an athlete. Maybe you imagined living somewhere far from where you grew up. Maybe you believed you would marry the person you were dating. Or maybe your ambitions were simpler. You wanted a family of your own, enough money to feel secure, and the ability to make your parents proud. Now imagine your younger self asking whether any of those things happened, and you begin explaining. You tell them what you do for a living, where you live, who you spend your time with. You explain what success eventually looked like and how different it was from what you expected. And you can see them trying to reconcile their answers with the future that they imagined. They ask why you never pursued that career, why you never moved away, why your life looks so different from what they expected. You explained your priorities changed. You discovered opportunities that you didn't know existed. You wanted different things once you understood what those things actually required. And some of your explanations make sense to them, but others don't. Because when we look backwards, our decisions often seem inevitable. We know what happened afterwards. We can explain how one circumstance led to another and why certain choices made sense at the time. But your younger self doesn't have the benefit of that history. To them, those possibilities are still open. And what you've accepted as the natural course of your life may look like a series of decisions that they never imagined making. Would your younger self be proud of you? We ask that question as though their approval would settle something important. But why should the person you were at 16 be the judge of the person you became? Think about what you believed made someone successful at that age. Think about the people you admired, the things you valued, and what you imagined happiness would feel like. Some of those beliefs held up. Others changed because you learned things you couldn't have known then. Your younger self might be disappointed that you never became a professional athlete, but they don't understand the life you eventually built. They might question why you walked away from a career without knowing what the career would have cost you. Their disappointment doesn't automatically mean you made the wrong decision. But neither does your experience automatically make you right. Because the younger version of you might notice something you haven't wanted to acknowledge. They may not understand why you chose your current life, But they can still ask whether you're happy living it. Now imagine the conversation changes. Your younger self has finished asking about careers, accomplishments, and the places that you've lived. And then they ask about the people. Are our parents okay? Think about what that question means when you're sitting across from your 16-year-old self. Maybe the answer is yes. Your parents are still here. They're older now. Perhaps your relationship has even grown stronger over the years. But what if the answer is no? Imagine having to explain that someone they love is no longer alive. Remember, the person sitting across from you doesn't know what's coming. That loss hasn't happened yet. They still have ordinary mornings with that person. They still hear their voice without thinking about how much it means. They can still walk into the kitchen and find them standing there. And now you're sitting across from them carrying the knowledge of a day that hasn't arrived in their world. What would you even say? Would you tell them when it happens? Would you tell them how? And if they asked whether you spent enough time together, whether you said everything you wanted to say, would you be comfortable with your answer? There's something deeply unsettling about knowing that a moment someone else considers ordinary will eventually become a memory they give almost anything to experience again. And you can't make them fully understand that. Not yet. Because telling someone about a loss and living through it are two different things. then They ask about their friends. The people they see every day. The ones they assume will be standing beside them for the rest of their lives. And you explain that some of those friendships lasted. Others slowly faded as your lives moved in different directions. And there may be people you haven't spoken to in years. Imagine how strange that would sound to a 16-year-old who spent that afternoon laughing with someone you can barely remember the last time you called. They ask what happened. Was there an argument? Did someone betray us? And you explain that sometimes nothing dramatic has to happen. Nobody makes a decision to end the friendship. The calls become less frequent. Someone moves away. People begin building lives that no longer overlap. And one day you realize that someone who once knew almost everything about your life now knows very little about it. your younger self struggles to understand that. Because to them, those relationships still feel permanent. And then comes another question. Did we end up with the person we thought we would? Your younger self is thinking about someone they look for in the hallway between classes, Someone they could spend their entire night talking to, even though they knew they'd see them again in the morning. Someone whose presence could change their entire day. And they're asking whether the person is still part of their life. Perhaps the answer is yes. But what if it isn't? Imagine explaining that there came a day when the two of you spoke for the last time. That there was a final conversation, even if neither of you knew it would be the last. and the person they couldn't imagine going a day without seeing is now someone you haven't spoken to in years. Then they ask why, and you try to explain what happened, how the relationship changed, how the two of you became different people, how something you once believed would last forever eventually came to an end. But sitting across from you is someone who hasn't experienced any of that. They still remember the excitement of seeing that person walk into the room. They still remember exactly what made them fall in love. And suddenly you remember those things as well. whose world still contains people, relationships, and possibilities that no longer exist in yours. You know things about your future that you can't make them understand through explanation alone. But the conversation works both ways. because you're describing everything they've yet to lose. They're reminding you of what those things felt like before they were gone. Before the conversations, before the distance, before the relationships changed, and you begin remembering people, not simply through how things ended, but through what they meant while they were still part of your life. We become so familiar with the ending of our stories that those endings begin influencing how we remember everything that came before them. But the 16-year-old sitting across from you doesn't know the endings. They still love the people without the weight of what happens later. And for a moment, you remember what that felt like. eventually. Your younger self asks about something different. Something that once mattered to you. Maybe it was a sport you loved playing, music you spent hours practicing, or a place you always dreamed of visiting. They want to know whether you still do it. And you tell them no. They ask why. You explain that life changed. You got busy, other things became more important. and then they ask when you plan to start doing them again. You don't have an answer. most of us have things in our lives that disappeared this way. We missed a week, then a month, a year past, and something that once felt essential became something we used to do. Eventually, we stopped questioning its absence. and there's an important distinction here. Did you decide to leave that part of your life behind, or did you slowly surrender it? Because those are not the same thing. Sometimes we outgrow our ambitions. We learn enough about ourselves to recognize that a dream no longer fits the person that we are becoming. letting it go can be an act of maturity. But there are things we abandon without ever making that decision. Fear makes us hesitate to try again. Responsibilities occupy the time we once gave to the things that we loved. And gradually, the life we're living becomes so familiar that we stop considering what might be missing from it. Imagine your younger self asking why you stopped doing something that you loved. You explain that it wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't making money. It wasn't helping us achieve anything. And then they look at you confused and ask a very deep question. When did it need to? Somewhere in adulthood, many of us begin measuring almost everything through what it responsibilities increase, other people depend on us. The consequences of our decisions become more significant. But there can be a cost to evaluating everything through its usefulness. We start treating enjoyment as something that needs to be earned. Curiosity becomes difficult to justify unless it leads somewhere. in activities we once loved simply for the experience begin feeling unproductive. There are things our younger selves didn't understand about responsibility, discipline, and sacrifice. but there's also no guarantee that every quality we've developed through adulthood has made our lives better. Experience can teach patience. While making us more guarded. Responsibility can give our lives meaning while consuming the time we once gave to the things we loved. And ambition can open extraordinary doors while making it difficult to appreciate everything that doesn't move us toward the next one. Your younger self may not understand what your life requires today, but they remember what mattered to you before those requirements existed. And now you're forced to examine whether everything you left behind truly needed to be left. Because there may be parts of your younger self you no longer recognize. Not because you outgrew them, but because you stopped paying attention to them. Now imagine looking at your younger self after everything that you've discussed. You've told them about the life you built, the people you lost, the things you accomplished, and the things you left unfinished. And as you look at them, you begin remembering what it actually felt like to be that person, their insecurities, their fears, how badly you wanted to be accepted. You remember the things they were ashamed of and how certain experiences affected them. Things you can now look back on with a different understanding. and sitting across from them, you recognize something uncomfortable. You have more compassion for that younger version of yourself than you currently have for the person that you've become. You can look at a 16-year-old version of yourself and understand why they made certain mistakes. They didn't know any better. They were making decisions with the limited understanding that they possessed. You wouldn't expect them to get everything right. But somewhere along the way, you begin expecting something different from yourself. You started treating mistakes as evidence that you should have known better. You judge yourself for not being further along, even when navigating circumstances you've never experienced before. And yet the person you are today is still learning. There are things happening in your life right now that you may not fully understand for another 10 or 20 years. Things you'll eventually look back on with the same perspective you now have towards the person sitting across from you. That doesn't remove your responsibility for the decisions you make. Accountability and cruelty are not the same thing. And there's something else about this meeting. We've spent so much time asking whether your younger self would be proud of you, but would you be proud of them? Not because of what they eventually accomplished. You already know that part of the story. Would you respect who they were before they had any evidence that things would work out? Think about the courage it takes to begin something without knowing whether you'll succeed. The younger version of you walked into unfamiliar situations, trusted people they barely knew, and tried things they weren't particularly good at. They made decisions without knowing how any of them would turn out. and when you look back now, which friendships wouldn't last, which opportunities wouldn't work out, and what certain decisions would eventually cost them. But they didn't have any of that knowledge. They were living through those moments for the first time and they kept going. because we sometimes look backwards and see how inexperienced we were. we remember the mistakes and forget how much courage it took to try. We judge the person we used to be without acknowledging how much of our current life began with decisions they were willing to make. person sitting across from you started building a life they couldn't fully imagine. and you're living with the results of their effort. but your younger self doesn't know what you've carried. They haven't experienced the mornings when getting out of bed required more effort than anyone realized. They haven't faced the decisions that force you to reconsider everything you believed about yourself. They don't know what it looks like to become the person sitting across from them. and even if the life you've built looks nothing like what they expected, that doesn't mean you failed them. One begin this journey without knowing where it would lead. The other continued after discovering how different reality could be from expectation. and whatever your life looks like today, you got here together. now, the conversation is coming to an end. Your younger self stands up and begins walking towards the door. They've heard about the life that they're going to live. Some of it excites them, some of it frightens them. And there are things that they still don't fully understand. You watch them walk away, knowing they're returning to a world where none of these experiences have happened yet. The friendships are still there. The dreams still feel possible. The people they love are still exactly where they expect them to be. And for a moment, you realize how much you would give to see the world through their eyes again. But imagine they stop before They turn around and look at you one last time. And now they're looking at someone who has experienced things they can only imagine. Someone who has seen dreams come true and others disappear. Someone who has loved people they haven't met yet. Someone who has endured things they didn't know were coming. They're looking at a life that's still ahead of them. Trying to understand what it must feel like to have already lived through so much of it. Maybe neither of you would want to trade places. Maybe you would simply understand each other a little better. one of you knows how the story began and the other knows how much of it has unfolded. But neither of you knows how it ends. This is Yin. If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Not everyone, just someone who's ready. You can find Yin Worldwide Podcast on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. If you want to go deeper, visit our website at liveyin.com. Subscribe if you're committed to the work. If not, that's fine too. This isn't for everyone. Remember, move with intention.