Most of us treat our past selves as reliable narrators — as if the person who made a choice five years ago was essentially you, just with less information. But the Yoruba philosophical concept of *ori* — roughly, the personal essence or inner head that evolves through lived experience — challenges this quietly. In Yoruba thought, the self is not a continuous thread but a dynamic entity shaped by accumulated relationship and event; who you were is genuinely a different configuration than who you are now. This intersects strikingly with work by the psychologist Hal Hershfield, whose studies on 'future self continuity' found that people who feel low psychological continuity with their past or future selves treat those selves almost like strangers — which explains why we can be so oddly unmoved by our own old regrets or old victories. The practical edge: when you catch yourself saying 'I've always been someone who...' — about punctuality, about ambition, about how you use your mornings — you may be borrowing an identity from a stranger and mistaking it for a fact about today.

Name one 'I've always been someone who...' belief about your relationship with time. How old is the evidence for it, and who collected it?

Drawing from Yoruba Philosophy combined with Identity Psychology — Yoruba philosophical concept of *ori* and Hal Hershfield (future self continuity research, 2011–present)