How did I become the person I used to despise?
The question usually comes from outside. You hear your own voice say something, and it is the tone of a person you swore at twenty you would never be. Or you look at how your week went and recognise it. It is the week of someone you once felt sorry for.
The natural next step is to look for the moment it happened. Which choice, which year, which job. Most people can't find one. That is part of what makes the question so unsettling.
In 1898 Anton Chekhov wrote a short story about exactly this. It is called Ionitch.
A doctor who walked
Dmitri Startsev arrives in a provincial town as a young district doctor. He has no horses yet, so he walks to town and sings on the way. He falls in love with the daughter of the most cultivated family in the place and waits for her half the night in a cemetery. She turns him down.
Nothing dramatic follows. By then he already has a pair of horses and a coachman. Over the next four years he takes to playing cards at the club. In the evenings he pulls the day's banknotes out of his pockets and counts them with pleasure. When the girl he once loved comes back and asks how he lives, he says:
"We grow old, we grow stout, we grow slack."
— Anton Chekhov, Ionitch, tr. Constance Garnett, chapter IV
He says it about the town and its people. He can also hear that it is about himself.
No day it happened
Chekhov leaves a lot out. Startsev never betrays anyone. He never takes a bribe or makes a cynical bargain. There is no scene where he chooses money over medicine. Each step on its own is reasonable: horses are better than walking, cards are better than empty evenings, a larger practice is better than a small one.
The story is built from these steps. None of them looks like a change of course, so none of them had to be noticed. By the last chapter he shouts at his patients and owns several houses, and nobody in the town remembers the doctor who walked and sang.
This is why searching for the decision rarely helps. Chekhov suggests there wasn't one. There was a concession, repeated until it stopped feeling like a concession and started feeling like the way things are.
Where this sits
A different page, on the sense of wasting your life, looks at a whole life from its end. Startsev's drift happens in the middle, while there is still plenty of time, which is what makes it so easy to miss.
Existential therapy pays close attention to this kind of drift: choices that were made by not being made. The page on the four givens describes freedom as one of the facts a person lives with, including the freedom they stop using.
What the story leaves
Chekhov does not say how Startsev could have stayed himself. He shows the evenings with the banknotes, and in chapter IV the brief warmth when Startsev almost recognises what he has lost. The question the story leaves is smaller than "how did I become this": which concession have I been making for so long that I no longer notice it?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.