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Version
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A version is one of multiple configurations of the same underlying thing.
The inhabitant’s life includes many versions of the inhabitant. The awareness of this varies widely. The hardware does not run a single version continuously. The inhabitant at rest is different from the inhabitant under pressure. The inhabitant with this group is different from the inhabitant with that group. The inhabitant on the first cup of coffee is different from the inhabitant at the end of the day. The inhabitant at twenty was different from the inhabitant at fifty.
The substrate has continuity. The actual operating configuration varies substantially based on conditions. The inhabitant who imagines they are a single fixed thing across all of these is operating from a model that does not match the underlying mechanics.
INSISTING ON A SINGLE CONSISTENT VERSION
The inhabitant either fails to maintain the consistency and concludes they are inauthentic, or maintains it through suppression of the actual variation and accumulates strain.
The system that is suppressed into uniform presentation across all conditions runs continuous override of natural variation. The override costs capacity. The suppressed variation usually surfaces elsewhere — in dreams, in displaced behavior, in eventual breakdown. The same person at funeral, at work, with old friends, alone is not the same configuration. Insisting that it should be produces friction rather than coherence — and the inhabitant who has worked hard to be the same person in every room is often the inhabitant other people find hardest to actually know.
TREATING EACH VERSION AS A SEPARATE OPERATOR
The opposite failure mode.
The inhabitant who concludes they have no stable self because they vary across conditions has misread variation as discontinuity. The substrate is continuous. The variations are versions of the substrate, not separate entities. Recognition of both the continuity and the variation is more accurate than either pole — and more useful, because both poles produce false conclusions about what the inhabitant should do next.
There is a self that runs through all the versions. It is not most of any single version. It is what they have in common.
NOTICING THE MAJOR VERSIONS
Across the typical week, in what conditions does the inhabitant run which version? What features vary and what features remain stable? What configurations does the inhabitant least often access?
The honest examination often surfaces that the life includes more variation than the inhabitant had registered. Some versions are accessed rarely or not at all — sometimes because the conditions that elicit them have been excluded from the life, often without the inhabitant ever having decided to exclude them.
BUILDING ACCESS TO VERSIONS THAT WARRANT BEING AVAILABLE
The inhabitant with access only to the controlled professional version benefits from developing access to the looser social version, the still rest version, the intense engaged version.
The inhabitant with access only to the casual social version benefits from developing access to the focused work version, the formal version when contexts warrant. The development happens through running the operations in conditions that elicit them, not through decision alone. I should be more spontaneous does not produce spontaneity. Time in conditions that allow spontaneity, repeatedly, gradually does.
WHEN A VERSION IS PRODUCING DAMAGE
Examine whether the conditions that elicit it can be changed, whether a different version can be developed for those conditions, or whether the version itself can be modified.
The version that runs in a particular relationship, a particular workplace, a particular family configuration — these are responses to those conditions. They can sometimes be adjusted by adjusting the conditions. Sometimes by developing different responses. Sometimes by exiting the conditions when the version they elicit is incompatible with the inhabitant the inhabitant wants to be.
The inhabitant who only meets a damaging version of themselves in a specific room may need to leave the room, eventually, even if the room is a relationship of long standing.
CONTINUITY THROUGH THE VERSIONS
Some features remain across conditions — the underlying disposition, the basic values, the core capacities.
Recognition of the continuity prevents the disorientation of treating versions as separate. Recognition of the variation prevents the strain of treating them as required to be identical. The functional configuration includes both. The inhabitant who holds both runs less internal conflict than the one who insists on one and overrides the other — and tends to recognize themselves in older photographs without either over-identifying with the person in them or feeling that person was someone else entirely.
The inhabitant is not single. The inhabitant is also not many. The inhabitant is a configuration that runs versions of itself across conditions.