If you could snap your fingers and all your tastes and preferences would change overnight, would you do it? I don’t think I would—even if I woke up having lots of things I (newly) liked, knowing how to cook the new foods I liked, with friends who also (newly) liked all the things I liked, and so on. I’m guessing you wouldn’t do it, either. My question: why not?

Inmy last post, I considered two kinds of answer to this question. First, you might say that the tastes and preferences you have now areyours这就是为什么你想留住他们。或者，更彻底地说，改变你的品味和偏好需要改变你的核心自我——“从内心深处”真正的你。这两个答案似乎都不令人满意，因为它们都没有给我们任何不进行更改的明显理由。我们可以简单地问我们最初问题的一个版本，用稍微不同的术语。为什么不尝试一些新的口味和偏好呢?此外，为什么不改变你的核心自我呢?

你可能会认为改变你的核心自我会构成某种死亡。如果你这样想过，你就会有很多同伴。In his magnum opusIn Search of Lost Time,Marcel Proust treated change in what (and who) you love as the death of a self you once were. Proust thought that this kind of death of a self is complete when you look back on something you previously adored with utter indifference. That is something you might well do in my thought experiment, if you were to change your tastes and preferences overnight. The jazz you once loved might leave you completely cold. That can sound like something to mourn.

But is it really all that illuminating to say that changing your core self is a form of death? It might at first seem illuminating, in the following way. Death is something we fear and resist, even though it’s not rational to do that. We can explain such resistance nonetheless. A long history of selective evolutionary pressures has left us organisms who remain with the kind of death aversion that tended to propagate our species in the past. The ones who feared and resisted death were the ones who tended to survive, and they passed that resistance on to us.

But we cannot transfer explanation of a fear of death back to help us with our question. The pressures that left us who we are today selected for a fear ofliteral死亡——当一个动物有机体停止运作时会发生什么。但核心自我的“死亡”完全不是一回事。如果你明天醒来时有全新的口味和偏好，你仍然是前一天那个功能正常的动物机体。你甚至可以对之前发生的事情有清晰而丰富的记忆。事情不会是这样的，有一天，你的灯真的熄灭了。出于这个原因，将核心自我的剧烈变化称为“死亡”并不能很容易地解释我们对这种变化的抗拒。

Here’s a more compelling explanation of our resistance to change in the core self that does not make that resistance end up looking reasonable.

The kind of change you usually consider is local: for instance, change to just one taste or preference you have. You might worry that you will stop loving David Foster Wallace (DFW) one day, or that you will stop finding joy in eating food of many diverse cuisines. You might have real, genuine reason to resist any such local change in your tastes. For example, you might have built friendships around your love for DFW, and you would drift away from those friends if you stopped loving him. Your taste for all sorts of food might lead you to travel to new and exciting places, and you would miss doing that too if you stopped loving new kinds of food.

But now we are not considering just some such local change in just one taste or preference. We are considering a global change to all your tastes at once—with a corresponding change that instantaneously restructures your world in order to cater to those new tastes.

Since such global change involves lots of local change, and you have at least some reason not to undergo each such local change, you might think these reasons add up tolotsof reasons not to undergo such global change to your tastes and preferences too. But this does not follow. Your reasons might not be structured in this way.

Some reasons that you have not to undergo local changes in taste depend on other tastes of yours, as with the food and travel example. Other reasons not to undergo such local changes depend on the way you’ve organized your life around what you like, as with DFW. But if there’s a global change in your tastesanda corresponding global change in the way your world is set up around those tastes, it’s not as though all your reasons not to change sum up to one huge set of reasons not to change all your tastes. Instead, all your reasons not to change would evaporate. There wouldn’t be other stable tastes to give you reason not to change individual tastes of yours—and your world wouldn’t bear against changing your tastes, either.

If there really isn’t reason not to undergo global change in all your tastes and preferences, why do we resist it? I think we all easily get confused. We generalize from the pain and inconvenience of local change to imagine that global change would involve much more pain and inconvenience—even if our world changed to cater to our new tastes. I think this is a mistake, but it’s a sticky one. I keep making it myself.

There may always be reason not to change your tastes and preferences alittlebit, even though there may be no reason not to change themcompletely只要你的世界随着你不断变化的品味和偏好而自我调整。也就是说，也许你应该接受改变你的核心自我，就像我描述的那样。但这并不意味着你应该接受更多的局部或增量变化。毕竟，这些都是困难的问题。

Photo byNiv SingeronUnsplash