As that implies, stories starring a true self are teleological; we end up exactly where we are meant to be. This, too, is both an attraction and a weakness of the idea of an essential self. It suggests that our lives are deterministic, that yesterday’s convictions—which we thought we chose based on their intellectual, emotional, or spiritual merits—were merely a trap into which we were lured for the benefit of some predetermined future self. Whatever meaning or worth our past might have had on its own terms is effectively written out of existence. Even more problematically, the idea of a true
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