Personal Identity

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YEARS GONE BY, FROZEN IN TIME…
AN EVALUATION OF PERSONAL IDENTITY “OBJECTIFICATION”

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What is time? Is it a measure of the distance between the past and present (as Physicist Sean Carroll mentions) or is it something more fluid (Huffington Post 2012)? Personally I have always been one to take my time; letting it pass as if it didn’t exist, living as if to exist symbiotically with it. What other people called “wasting time” I saw as experiencing it. But it wasn’t until I began to feel the stress of time that I began to wear it, and it wasn’t until I began to wear time that pieces of my identity began to embed themselves in time. What I am referring to is what I call a “gentlemen’s wrist watch”. The gentlemen’s wrist
Freud’s theory includes 3 psyche levels (Conscious, subconscious, Unknowing conscious) which are influenced by 3 psyche forces (Id, ego, super-ego). The psyche levels seem to work in a progressively-independent way. The Unknowing conscious serves as the incubator of assumptions, while also holding implicit assumptions. The sub conscious is the space of transition of these assumptions from random access to readily acquire as well as the holding bin for pseudo-assumptions. Lastly, the conscious is the space for explicit assumptions that are realized and fully understood (to the best of our knowledge). Yet even in the conscious the other levels of psyche play a role in constantly reforming and challenging assumptions. According to the above evaluation of the levels of psyche, my connection to watches started with my admiration of individuals like James Bond, Indiana Jones,
The Great Gatsby, Sherlock Holmes, and the like. These individual became a part of my random access memory that manifested its self into an unrealistic desire to become the most interesting man in the world, a sort of idiosyncrasy. But as this assumption became coupled with the fact that the world is a large and diverse place and that I would have
Permanently changing it definition from what it was, making it closer to becoming garbage. So, as Rathge describes, as things lose their relevance and eventually become garbage they seemingly lose all meaning to us, but with that I would like to pose the question what if somebody tried to take your garbage? What if somebody (after losing its relevance) tried to take my watch?

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As I evaluate my “self-objectifications” I revisit the symbolic nature of Fresh Kills in using discarded material culture to be a foundation for building new material cultures and wonder how the material cultures I embraced now are but temporary, foundational artifacts to material cultures I will embrace in the future. I think of how the manifest functions of my material are as fragile as crystal glass, beautiful to look at but shattering at the slightest impact of changing identity. I wonder what, once my gentlemen’s wrist watch has lost relevance, will be the story it told to garbologist and archeologist about the past me. What pieces of my identity will forever remain with my watch; forever frozen in