{"id":12,"date":"2005-12-09T08:23:35","date_gmt":"2005-12-09T16:23:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/archive.bryanfriedman.com\/ramblings\/?p=12"},"modified":"2006-05-10T00:29:25","modified_gmt":"2006-05-10T00:29:25","slug":"present_lives_of_past_friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.bryanfriedman.me\/ramblings\/?p=12","title":{"rendered":"Present Lives of Past Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever notice how some people never change? I mean some people go through life and mature and grow and learn. Others just sort of don’t. I’d like to believe that I fall in the former category rather than the latter, but it seems like I’m coming across more and more people who are pretty much the same as they were one, two, three, five, or ten years ago. Why?<\/p>\n

The way I see it, there are four possibilities to explain this phenomenon:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Nobody ever changes. People may grow and learn but personalities stay the same and that’s why it seems like they never change.<\/li>\n
  2. Everybody changes but some people don’t forecast this change. They grow and learn but still act and appear the same to us because we don’t really know them that well any more.<\/li>\n
  3. We see people how we want to see them. We know or knew people one way, so that is how we will always see them regardless of whether they change or not. (This is similar to number two, but not exactly the same: in number two we aren’t shown the change, in this case we just don’t see it.)<\/li>\n
  4. Finally, it’s entirely possible that the old adage that “some things never change” is just a load of shit but we just all believe it because we’ve heard it before.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Okay, here comes some fuzzy logic based on these four completely arbitrary answers to my question of why.<\/p>\n

    I just can’t believe that it’s number one because some people, I think, do change significantly over time. I don’t think it’s number four because old adages usually turn out to be true. So I would say that it is some combination of numbers two and three.<\/p>\n

    This is why I actually love this forum for myself. I can write whatever the hell I want, back it up, make weak arguments, and come out believing myself. It’s genius.<\/p>\n

    So, finally, my conclusion to this whole mess.<\/p>\n

    I look at people that I’ve known in my past lives as a high school student, a college student, a working professional, and a boyfriend, a friend, or an acquaintance (and these are the people I’m talking about since people you see all the time rarely seem to change anyway because you see them gradually change if they do at all) and I wonder many things. How could I have ever been associated with this person? Why did these people exit my life? What did I get out of them at the time? What did they get out of me? Do I seem the same to them like they seem the same to me? I never have answers to these questions. I’m sure I never will. Still, I’m eternally puzzled by the present lives of past friends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Ever notice how some people never change? I mean some people go through life and mature and grow and learn. Others just sort of don’t. I’d like to believe that I fall in the former category rather than the latter, but it seems like I’m coming across more and more people who are pretty much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-philosophical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.bryanfriedman.me\/ramblings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.bryanfriedman.me\/ramblings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.bryanfriedman.me\/ramblings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.bryanfriedman.me\/ramblings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.bryanfriedman.me\/ramblings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.bryanfriedman.me\/ramblings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.bryanfriedman.me\/ramblings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.bryanfriedman.me\/ramblings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.bryanfriedman.me\/ramblings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}