I just had a conversation about the difference between conceptualizing your own life as something like a balance sheet, versus something like a profit & loss statement, and I’m finding this a surprisingly fruitful analogy.
Balance sheet: You are tracking assets and liabilities – a snapshot overview of your position in the world. Assets might be literal money and stuff, intangibles like skills, youth, attractiveness, family ties, or even more nebulous, like memories of good experiences. If you’re looking at your life from a balance sheet perspective, you are a collector, trying to gather and hold onto as much of the good as possible. Surveying your life and noting that you’re holding a good-sized pool of equity (of all types) will feel safe and successful. Giving up possessions, forgetting childhood memories, or drifting away from friends and family, might feel like losing a part of yourself. I associate this model with a diachronic sense of self.
(There is probably some possible analogy here re depreciation on assets, that I’m too tired to unpack right now).
Profit & loss: You are tracking revenue and expenditures – the rate of change over time, and whether your trajectory is positive on net. Recent good experiences, learning and personal growth and skills gained, and literal money-earning potential feel like success and safety, as does having more than enough energy and motivation to fuel your ongoing day-to-day life; putting in unsustainable amounts of effort, spending yourself to stay afloat, feels like the worst kind of failure. Your absolute position, and where you were five years ago, both matter less. Noticing that you’ve left something behind (friends, family, an old sense of self) in your race for forward momentum, probably doesn’t hurt as much. I associate this viewpoint with being more episodic.
I tend toward the profit & loss (which makes sense, I’m more episodic than many people I know), and I think I’ve moved even further in that direction in recent years, an adaptation to the life I’ve chosen – it doesn’t feel like I have the luxury to sit around accumulating assets and stability and a comfortable position to survey my life. The categories of revenue I’m currently pulling in are totally different from what I was tracking five years ago, when I was a nurse in Canada, and that seems fine. I’m not the same person as I was then.
I think this does make me more vulnerable towards vicious spirals in bad times, and over-updating on how things have gone recently.
I was unfamiliar with the terms “diachronic” and “episodic” sense of self, so I looked them up and found this [link].
The post mentions diachronics often “pitying” episodics, but I find my main emotion is not *pity* but *defensiveness*. The web of associations I’m getting is mostly people (they usually call themselves Buddhists; I don’t know enough about Buddhism to know how central an example they are) who think that [lacking a sense of a cohesive, continuous self] is both the objectively more true and subjectively superior way to live, and that the highest goal in life is to obtain it. IME, the one being pitied is usually *me*. I wonder what kind of circles 2012!RONBC travelled in.
Interestingly, given your examples, for much of my life “how much money do I currently have saved up” has been a *much* larger factor in the strength of my financial position than “how much income am I likely to make in the near future”. I’ve spent a *lot* of time over the years living primarily off of savings, and these days I do sometimes tend to view income, not as directly going to expenses, but as a way of acquiring savings that one then *actually* uses.
And come to think of it, this isn’t even the first time that someone has connected that with me having a stronger continuity of self [link], though not in quite the same sense that you’re talking about.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but it’s interesting stuff.
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Brinens and Things 
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