good evening. before i continue on, i want to mention once again that this self is a snapshot of myself frozen in time, and that my current self dies daily (or more often) and is replaced by a new one. some of the topics mentioned here are ones that change especially often.

i am often reminded that we are all a product of the people around us blended together in a selective way. i sometimes worry i copy some people too much. others sometimes worry they are copying me too much. i dont really mind being copied, i actually enjoy it a bit. maybe others do too.

when i worry about copying people too much, what i am really worrying about is that i am selecting too many ideas from the same person instead of taking them from a wide population, because unless i want to become The Self-Reliant, Self-Sufficient Man Who Lives In Isolation, i will be taking select ideas from others. so that is not the problem; the problem, should it even be a problem, is that i take all of them from a small amount of people. incest but for ideas.

the strange thing is i simultaneously think i copy too much and think i dont actually copy that much. some days i will feel like i am a complete clone of some person or people, and others i know that that's bullshit.

part of the issue is that my self is contextual. when interacting, i automatically become a bit more similar to who i am interacting with. this undoes itself when i am back to myself or interacting with someone else. if i thus interact with some set of people a lot, i spend a lot of time being more similar than average to them.

so, to summarize: i copy others too much, but i dont copy others too much and if i do its not that much and if it is then its temporary. great, doesnt sound like someone in denial at all. and yet i dont think any of it is wrong. its more different ways to look at it, but i am dissatisfied with this answer. i am nothing that particularly enjoys this ambiguity, i prefer to know what i am doing.

so let me know what i am doing: i am copying both as part of the usual ways i change, which include copying ideas i like, and as part of temporary assimilation. the temporary assimilation changes how i act, and the copied ways of being change everything about me, including what i act on and how i do it. the copied ways of being indicate a liking for the ideas of the copied. the assimilation indicates interaction with the assimilated-to.

both are fine, copied ways of being and acting in fact constitute a sort of compliment, though it can end up feeling too much, especially in combination with the assimilation. as such, it makes sense to diversify my interaction-pool some more again. this both helps me gain ideas more separate from the idea-leaders i am usually exposed to, and diversifies the assimilation. this increases the pool of self, which, apart from myself, currently contains not a particularly large number of idea sources. i need to make sure however that they do not dilute the self-sourced ideas, only diversify the others-sourced ones.

i sometimes feel like i do not give myself enough credit. this is probably true. to fix it, i should be more explicit in selves such at this, which are somewhat self-critical in their reflection of the self: i should note that the amount of ideas passing straight through me unaltered is near-zero, but the color of the sludge still can look vaguely too similar to what others around me produce, for my tastes. unlike an LLM, i do have a significant number of "original" ideas, though i do not know what "original" means or if it even exists as what you may think it means.