4 - Future selves, worry and Schuld
from Time and money
Summary
How easy is it to be selfish?
Recently, returning to my family home in Dublin, I discovered a photograph of myself aged nine or ten. I can remember the day it was taken. Someone had given me a simple inexpensive camera as a gift. On a late afternoon after school I took photographs of all the members of my family, and one of them must have taken one of me. It was probably my father. He always took the photographs in our family, so the ones I took that day are among the few we have of him.
The experiences of that child affect who I am today. I share memories with him. We share origins, and experiences. But he could easily have had a very different life from mine. Am I the same person as him? Some of the decisions I made as a child still influence me today. Decisions I make now may affect me, or my children, in twenty or thirty years' time. Distance, measured by time, presents our self in the past or future as another person. There is a tension between the self now and in the future that mirrors the conflicts that can exist between our interests and those of others. Everyday language reveals this tension: we do not always do ourselves justice. The colloquial phrase “look after yourself”, a phrase the Irish use a lot, suggests that often we do not. This is not impractical or irrelevant philosophy: when I wake in the morning with a severe hangover, I curse the fool who selfishly drank too much the night before.
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- Money , pp. 47 - 64Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2009