You only could have ever been yourself or not at all

You only could have ever been yourself or not at all

There is only so much variation in the circumstances of your birth that are possible until you are looking at a timeline where you were never born. When two human beings reproduce, there are hundreds of tiny spermatozoa with slightly different genetic information inside of them which meet one of hundreds of eggs conceived and expunged over a lifetime each with slightly different genetic information and when they meet there is a semi-random process of merging these two sets of information to result in the DNA that creates the bare minimum necessary to say that this is you.

Whatever happens on from that point, the varying timelines, those would all change who you turned out to be, and there are arguments that can be made that you would have turned out to be so different it can't be said that that is even you anymore. That that is just a different person.

But fundamentally, if you change the circumstances of your conception, then you cannot in any way say that that is you, because if the conception was delayed or accelerated by even an hour, hell if a different sex position was used even, then different spermatozoa would have met different eggs, their combination would have been different, and you would get different seed DNA to procedurally generate the rest of you.

One must only look to full siblings to see how radically different a human being conceived by the same two human beings can turn out to be. My biological brother has such little resemblance to me in appearance or behavior that people would often be shocked to learn that we are related, but we do have so much in common with our bio parents, both physically and in terms of behavior, that it is undeniable that we are both their biological children. We just took after very different parts of them.

The implications of this are severe. It means you could not have been born in another era. you could not have been born in another country. You could not have been born to different parents (although you could have been raised by different parents.) In fact, any single important enough change in the timeline of history would surely have meant that you would have never been born at all. If I went back in time and killed Hitler, it would cause a paradox. I would never have been born to go back in time to kill him. There is no Shel Raphen born in a world where the holocaust did not happen. My zeyde would not have enlisted in the army, and such a radical change to his timeline means my mother would not have been born.

The entirety of human history up until your birth is most likely a mandatory precondition to your own existence. This is the world that we live in. You and I could never meet in a world without the internet, because neither of us would exist in that world. Even if we only go off of a nature-based determination of who we are let alone who we grew up to be given everything that came after our births.

There is no what could have been, only where to go from here.