“You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” - Alan Watts.
From one moment to the next, you are already different - physically and emotionally. What you can give, tolerate, or care about shifts as you change.
Yet we work hard to preserve a sense of fixed identity.
That pressure rarely starts with us. Consistency makes us easier for others to read. It stabilises expectations, reduces uncertainty, and helps people feel safe around us. In that way, consistency functions as social glue.
Over time, this 'habit' becomes an internal rule: I should STILL BE who I was.
We tell ourselves stories: this is who I am, this is what I do, this is what I believe. These narratives are not false. They are useful summaries of past behaviour. The problem arises when we treat them as obligations rather than reference points.
When life conditions change, continuing to measure yourself against an earlier configuration of standards creates constant friction. You keep trying to show up in ways that no longer fit. Effort increases, internal tension rises, but effectiveness does not.
This is often misinterpreted as personal failure. More accurately, it is a mismatch between old standards and present conditions.
If something you've been used to doing no longer fits the situation you’re now in, you are allowed to stop doing it.
You don’t owe your past self loyalty. That version of you was responding to different constraints, with different information.
Much of what people experience as effort and strain in life is really the energy they expend holding themselves in place, stretched between the disparity of memory and reality. Maintaining an identity for its own sake. Bracing against change so they don’t have to question who they are allowed to be now.
What came before can still inform you. Experience matters. Memories matter. But they don’t get to decide who you are by default.
Five minutes ago is already gone.
And you have changed.