A FEW weeks ago, while browsing my Twitter feed, I came across this psychology article headlined “You’re a completely different person at 14 and 77 years old, personality study suggests.” The UK study, dubbed the “longest running” of its kind, claimed that, since our personality changes so drastically from youth to old age (on paper, at least), one may turn out to be a “completely different person” by the time they hit their late seventies. The methodology involved gathering teachers’ personality assessments of some 1,208 Scottish fourteen-year-old students, and then have those same students go over the assessments more than six decades later to try to find out whether any of the observations their now-deceased teachers noted still applied.
The conclusion? “When the researchers compared the results at 77 years to those at 14 years, they found no notable correlation.”
The article got me thinking how interesting it would be to see this study replicated with millennials and Gen Zers. And we may not have to wait six decades to do so. With social media being such a pervasive force in our lives today, these “completely different person” sentiments seem to be manifesting much sooner than we realize. Case in point: Whenever Facebook, through its “Memories” feature, brings up a picture we uploaded barely two years ago, of ourselves posing with “friends” we’ve since fallen out with or outgrown, how often have we not reacted with something akin to “Stupid Facebook! Stop reminding me of people I wouldn’t even dream of associating myself with today”?
Up until two years ago, I was what my present self would describe as a “capitalist apologist.” I had entered the workforce with ideals of “career success” and “financial stability”—achievable, I believed, if one simply worked hard and kept a positive attitude. This petit bourgeois mentality emerged from my years of fancy private-school education; my exposure to more privileged friends with families of entrepreneurial backgrounds; my “liking” of the official FB pages of sites like Business Insider, Fortune, and even (ugh) Elite Daily, which featured write-ups of how one can attain success by living a certain way or emulating this or that businessperson; and even my occasional reading of books frequently mentioned on said sites. Oh yeah, and it also didn’t help that my first job was with a company chaired by one of those enterprise-loving Bible-belt Republicans who thanked God with his thick Oklahomey drawl for all the hard work we did “making dreams come true” for his clients (whom he’d really been swindling the whole time).
Throughout this period, I posted on Facebook some of the “insights” I gathered from the aforementioned sources, ostensibly to publicize my type A worldview, and maybe also to inspire a friend or two to jump on the bandwagon.
This deluded outlook, however, just like the capitalist ideology on which it was couched, could only sustain itself for so long. After having read a good number of these articles and books, I realized they were basically spewing the same vague, pretentious platitudes over and over again: work passionately, arrive at the office early, excel above the rest, associate with successful people, etc.
Oklahomey Company’s shuttering was the final thread in this unraveling. They had been laying off employees for the past few months under the newspeak of “reinvention,” “rejuvenation,” “separating wheat from chaff,” among others. Being one of the higher-tiered ones, and having maintained a steady “far-from-chaffy” performance throughout my tenure, I thought I was safe. But they still let me go, leaving only a handful of employees to drag that dying horse all the way to the finish line. Oh, and did I mention the bulk of firings happened in December, when we were all expecting our bonuses and thirteenth-month pay?
By this time, all those readings about “hard work,” “attitude,” “grit,” “getting ahead,” or channeling X CEO’s habits felt like garbage, and all those times I aired my positive outlook online felt like, well, a taint on my FB timeline.
Crestfallen, and admittedly a bit wistful over the days when employment was a faraway concern, I reacquainted myself with some theorists I first encountered in my undergrad years but was too naïve to fully appreciate—Marx, Derrida, Chomsky. I read them with a different lens, and with a little more life experience. Through them, I was led to other theorists and writers who, by looking past those easily accessible readings I had subscribed to in my capitalist apologist days, were able to critique the dominant power structures of our time. And, just like I did back in the day, I shared over FB what insights I learned, taking on a more critical air this time around.
This change, as I reflect on it, is truly nothing short of astounding, and on the rare occasions that I ponder on those old posts, or when they come back to haunt me in zombified form via FB Memories, I can’t help but cringe or wince or face-palm myself, barely able to recognize that person I was years ago. Then again, I’m far from unique in this journey: coming to my mind are the abovementioned Scottish students who, I imagine, looked at their old assessments with a fair amount of head-scratching, eyebrow-furrowing, and chuckling; Charlton Heston, who went from prominent civil rights activist in the ‘60s to president of the National Rifle Association in the ‘90s; and even former classmates of mine who grew up wary of Martial Law, only to end up voting for a president who looks back on those tyrannical years with a troubling fondness.
Does it not make sense then for me—and maybe for some of us—to accommodate this new person, this new outlook with a new Facebook?