Learning about epigenetics, body regeneration, and the role of alien DNA (microbes) in my daily cravings has made me feel a bit like a colony. Today I was thinking about how much I had changed in the last thirty years. In the heyday of my career, I was purposeful, confident, demanding, and dismissive of some persons outside my tribe. Not constantly–kids take the edge off delusions of control and omniscience pretty conclusively–but for the most part.

I think it’s interesting that the new me has kept so many of the same old friends. Some of them may not know I’ve changed, because I don’t see them often. Some may have changed along with me. Some may rely on our shared experiences, though memory could well distort those. Some may detect some unchanging core to me, and perhaps there is.

I have new friends too, and they know the newer me, who is an intense people person, always looking for the deeper connection. I’m still a worker bee at work, but outside of work I’m pretty relaxed, and I’m very keen on leaving the workplace when my shift is over. I don’t demand anything of anyone on a regular basis, and while I occasionally make suggestions, those are mostly ignored. I managed to get my own health back, but I can’t seem to help anyone else with that, leaving me with some doubts about what worked and why.

One thing I thought I* would always be is a fact believer. There is Truth and Falsehood, perhaps not in philosophy, but in science, and in statistics, and in observable living, or so I would have asserted in the past. Yet I can no longer deny that most of the facts of my life have disintegrated.

• Science facts are subject to the next discovery, and most of the fundamental science of the 20th century, including scientific reductionism, the germ theory of disease, the tyranny of genes, the mutability of the nervous system, and everything doctors told us about nutrition, has been either weakened or completely debunked.
• Statistics are so contextual that it’s hard to come up with one that can’t be knocked down by another. There are a few that do fairly well, eg, most countries experience gun violence in proportion to the number of available firearms–but there are clear exceptions.
• Political polling is just a joke at this point. Maybe people lie to pollsters, or it’s impossible to get a random representative sample in the age of cell phones, or the wording of the questions skews the results, or entire swaths of voters don’t participate, or all of the above. For whatever reason, it’s no longer reliable, and I don’t know why anyone bothers to either give or consult polls.
• Life facts are subject to the vicissitudes of memory, which we now know is so unreliable that the more enlightened countries are banning eye-witness testimony in court. Any story you’ve ever told twice, you’ve altered. The more dramatic and searing the experience, the less likely you remember it accurately.

I do still have a model of the world that works for me, and so far inoculates me against conspiracies and reinforces my belief in coincidence. I hope I will keep at least that base, since those without it, I observe, suffer from fear and doubt to a disabling degree. I also am grounded by my friends old and new as well as my nuclear and extended family members. Though we are all changing colonies, our links seem to be strong and immutable.

• Perhaps as a colony I should use we? Those royals were centuries ahead of the science.