I think that if you have an intention of living for more than 20 years beyond now you have to psychologically prepare yourself for the possibility that you may meet a 100% perfect genetic clone of yourself, implanted with all your memories.
The question is, if you met a perfect copy of yourself, would it shatter your self-perception that you are the only person in the world exactly like you, like Mister Rogers told you what made you special when you were little.
Just for the record, as corny as it may sound, I completely believe in Mister Rogers, and think the world could use about a hundred clones of him right now, because there is nobody talking to kids like he did. These days, even PBS and their corporate sponsors treat kids as nothing more than consumers, or future consumers, or consumer influencers (i.e. brats who yell at their parents in the grocery store to buy stuff).
But the question at hand: is your uniqueness depending on your genetic code and your experiences, or, is it, in the parlance of Mister Rogers, just by your being you?
I’m preparing myself— I listen to “I’m a cliché” by the X-Ray Spex over and over, just as a spiritual practice— but it will certainly be a shock when I meet the Ezra Ball clone. It’s gonna be hard to tell him I just built him for spare parts.
In the meantime, I still figure I’m the only guy in Eastern Massachusetts born in the 15018 who went to Wabash College in Crawfordsville, IN, who knows the difference between ruby lambdas and blocks, who’s currently washing dishes in his kitchen drinking a PBR and listening to Miss Kitten at full blast. And sometimes the uniqueness is comforting, but, mostly, not.