Reminder (largely to myself) that
“I do not want to change this thing about the past”
and
“I would like to prevent this kind of thing happening in the future”
are beliefs that can coexist.
The question of whether you want to change a thing in the past is, practically speaking, irrelevant (as this is not possible)
and can therefore coexist with any belief you have about the future
(which your present self CAN influence, and is therefore what matters).
Thank you for listening.
<3
This applies to many things, such as:
“I was born to parents who were not ready to be parents and wouldn’t have had a kid if they’d known better. I am still glad I was born… AND I am also in favor of all people having access to birth control, abortion, and good education about sex and pregnancy and childraising so they can all make the best choice for themselves.”
“If I hadn’t gone through some pretty awful trauma, the person currently identified as ‘me’ would not exist in any recognizable form. I have been through a lot, but I’ve learned to love myself the way I am. I would not want to be erased and replaced with the hypothetical better and happier person who could exist if all that hadn’t happened. However, I will still fight like hell to protect other people from going through the same kind of trauma I had.”
“There was a terrible disaster hundreds of years ago that killed and hurt countless people. The hypothetical idea of undoing that disaster scares the hell out of me though, if I try to think about it in depth, because it would destroy pretty much everyone born since then, or at least make them different people with different lives, and thus undo who they are. BUT I WILL STILL TRY AND HELP STOP DISASTERS LIKE THAT EVER HAPPENING AGAIN dammit”
See, this isn’t contradiction.
One side is about the past, and the other is about the future.
and from our perspective in the present, there is a big difference between those things.
The past is what makes us who we are. Not only is changing it impossible for us, but we cannot exist without the past being what it was.
In fact, the idea of changing it is just about paradoxical; almost a meaningless question.
whereas, the future? is something we can and will affect. Whether or not we’re “destined” to affect it in a certain way, that’s beside the point. We don’t know yet how we’re gonna affect it– but we are going to, somehow.
And whatever we do, it’ll have consequences so huge that it’ll even determine which people exist, and what their lives are like, many years down the road.
But we don’t know any of the potential people or potential lives that those could be.
We can’t love them, care about them, the way we care about our present lives and the people in our lives today. We have no context to make us wanna play favorites, to choose some of those possible futures and possible people over others.
We only have an idea– generally, from our experience of the past– of which choices usually tend to lead to happier and healthier people.
And that is what we have to go on. We haven’t got anything else.