Updating Yourself: The Art of Changing with Time

It’s okay to change your mind. That’s why it’s important to be careful with the long-term promises we make to ourselves.

We, as human beings, have the ability to change, to evolve, to metamorphose; whichever word feels most fitting. This can, mistakenly, be confused with a kind of inconsistency in personality, as if our personality were a monolithic entity with no room for contradictions, conflicts, or uncertainties.

Changing your mind means moving forward with time, updating yourself in light of your life experiences and the lessons that come with them. Changing your mind doesn’t necessarily mean being easily influenced by external factors. We’re not necessarily impressionable just because we change our minds often. Changing is also about experimenting with new ways of being-in-the-world.

In my clinical practice, I meet clients who express a need to update themselves. These are people whose personal and professional lives are well established, yet who now wonder if this was truly what they always wanted, as they experience a certain dissatisfaction. Perhaps these were past desires, and now there are new desires, new possibilities, new paths. Or perhaps those earlier desires arose from social pressures and the collective imagination of success that promotes the illusion of permanent fulfillment.

Can we change our minds, even if the people around us are shocked by it and resist this new internal demand?

The answer is: Why not?

This drive for self-actualisation, however, runs up against a ready-made society that imposes prepackaged dreams of starting a family and choosing a career that provides the most comfortable life possible. We seek recognition, belonging, and personal achievement. We try to fill the unfillable void of an existence full of inconsistencies and empty of certainties. We are thus struck by an existential emptiness that is difficult to put into words.

To update oneself is to bring personal meaning to our existence in the present moment. Because the present is what we have right now, and who we are at the moment does not define our entire trajectory.