Perell makes a small observation about Popova's twenty-year body of work. She picks it up and takes it somewhere unexpected. Isn't it so true that — reading is a relationship between you, the author, and time. Totally. Time. Yeah. I've looked back on some things I've written so passionately about ten, fifteen years ago, and I'm like...1
She laughs at her own old work. The laugh isn't dismissive. It's recognition. She doesn't entirely agree with the version of herself who wrote those pieces. She's also fond of that version. The fondness and the not-agreement coexist.
Then the line that lands. I think if you're not a little bit embarrassed of who you were and how you lived, maybe the process of growth is not quite working.
The embarrassment is the diagnostic. The reader who returns to their own old writing and finds it perfectly aligned with their current views has either not changed at all in the intervening years or has retroactively edited their memory to make the past version align with the present. Both are problems. Real growth produces some embarrassment about the past because the past actually was different. The past self isn't who the current self is, and that's the point.
She extends the move to reading itself. Reading is a relationship between you, the author, and time. Not just author-and-reader. Three-party. The book hasn't changed. The author hasn't changed. The reader has changed. The reader's relationship to the book is therefore different on each reading because one of the three parties has been moving.
Popova is naming a fact about reading that contemporary culture mostly ignores.
The fact: a book doesn't have one meaning. A book has a meaning in relation to who the reader is when the reader reads it. The reader at 22 reading War and Peace gets a different book than the reader at 47 reading the same book. The pages are identical. The reader is not. The book the 47-year-old reads contains what the 22-year-old's version contained plus what the intervening 25 years have made available. The book is the same book operationally. The reading isn't the same reading.
This is why some books reveal themselves over time through rereading. Tolstoy reread at 47 contains material that wasn't reachable at 22. The 22-year-old wasn't a worse reader. The 22-year-old just didn't yet have the life-experience that lets the 47-year-old see certain things in the prose. The 47-year-old also doesn't have something the 22-year-old had — the freshness, the openness, the capacity to be opened by the book in ways the experienced 47-year-old has been opened too many times to be opened by again.
The three-party relationship — you, the author, and time — produces a different book on each encounter. Most readers don't reread. Most readers therefore experience each book exactly once, at the specific age they were when they read it. They miss what the same book would have given them at other ages. The serious reading-life involves rereading the books that matter. The rereading is what produces the fluidity of self over time that Popova names.
Popova extends the point. It speaks to the fluidity of self.
Absolutely. Absolutely. With seasons, with years, with emotions, hormones, whatever it is you want to call it — but that, as much as anything, is some of the best proof I have for how fluid the self can be. Is how much you can either be drawn to things that you've written and worked so hard in the past, or be almost repulsed by them.1
The relationship-with-old-work serves as evidence about the self. If you're drawn to your old work, you're still substantially the person who wrote it. If you're repulsed by it, you've become substantially different. Both are real states. The variation across time is the evidence for the fluidity.
This complicates the contemporary cultural emphasis on consistency or authenticity. The reader who treats their twenty-two-year-old self's views as their real self and then wonders why they no longer feel authentic at forty-seven is operating from a misunderstanding. The forty-seven-year-old has become a different person. The twenty-two-year-old's authenticity isn't the forty-seven-year-old's authenticity. Both are real. Neither is the truer self because no single truer self exists separable from the times in which the self was being itself.
This also implies a different ethics of memory. The forty-seven-year-old who feels they should still believe what the twenty-two-year-old believed is failing to allow the growth that twenty-five years should have produced. The forty-seven-year-old who refuses to take responsibility for what the twenty-two-year-old said is denying continuity that also exists. The mature stance is to hold both — the twenty-two-year-old was you and is not you. Continuity and difference both real. Neither displacing the other.
This page pairs with Incremental Revelation, Not Epiphany (Popova) — same writer's frame on change-over-time. Incremental revelation is how the change happens. The fluidity-of-self is what the change has produced when looked back at. The two pages combined describe Popova's full position on personal development across decades.
It connects to Reading to Survive (Popova). The survival-reading function is one form the three-party relationship takes. Specific books reach specific readers at specific moments because the time-and-reader configuration permits it. The two pages combined describe what reading does that's specifically temporal.
It connects to Voice Cultivation Through Stylistic Models (Wang). Wang treats voice as cultivated across years of model-study. The cultivation depends on the writer being a different person at year ten than at year one. The writer who reads the same masters across decades reads different books because the writer is different at each encounter. The principle Popova names operates inside Wang's discipline.
Popova has been writing publicly for twenty years. She can scroll back through The Marginalian's archive and find pieces from 2008, 2014, 2019. Some of them she still substantially agrees with. Some of them she'd write differently now. Some of them she'd rather not have written at all. The archive is partly a record of her own development across two decades.
The relationship she has with the archive is complicated. The 2008 piece is hers. The 2008 piece is also not exactly what she would write today. If she takes responsibility for the 2008 piece, she's accepting that the version of herself who wrote it is the version of herself the 2026 reader still has access to through the archive. If she rejects it, she's pretending the 2008 self wasn't real.
She mostly holds both. The pieces stay up. The reader who lands on a 2008 piece is reading the 2008 Popova, not the 2026 Popova. The reader who reads several pieces across the archive can watch the development. The development is part of what the archive offers. The development isn't a defect.
This is why she said the line about embarrassment. The pieces should produce some embarrassment when she rereads them, because she's been growing across two decades and the early pieces capture an earlier stage. If they didn't produce embarrassment, something would be wrong with the growth process. The embarrassment is evidence the process is operating.
The reader of her current work can use this as a frame for their own. The reader who has been writing publicly for years and rereads their old work should feel some embarrassment. The embarrassment isn't a failure. The embarrassment is the cost of having actually developed.
You have books you read at twenty that mattered to you. Three operational moves to test the three-party relationship.
Pick one book from a major prior life-stage. Could be the novel that defined your early twenties. The philosophy book that shaped you at twenty-five. The poet you obsessed over at thirty. The book that you remember as significant. Reread it now.
Notice what's different. The book hasn't changed. You have. Some of what landed at the prior age won't land now. Some of what didn't register then is suddenly significant. The differences aren't random. They're tracking what you've become.
Notice what you've lost. Some books are best at specific ages. The forty-year-old reading their twenty-year-old's favorite poems might find them thinner than they were. The thinness isn't the poems' fault. The forty-year-old has lost the kind of openness the twenty-year-old brought. The loss is real. The loss is also the price of growth. The forty-year-old has gained other capacities that the twenty-year-old didn't have. Different access, not less.
Hold both selves. The twenty-year-old who loved this book was you. The forty-year-old reading it now is also you. Neither is more real. The continuity and the change both real.
The practice across years builds something. The reader who runs rereading-as-practice develops a sense of their own movement through time that most readers don't have. The sense is operationally useful. It informs what they read next. It informs how they hold their current views (which will themselves seem different in twenty years). The sense is what the practice produces.
You've collapsed when you reread old work — your own or others' — and find no meaningful difference between what landed then and what lands now. The lack of difference is suspicious. Either you haven't grown in twenty years (operationally rare unless the years have been unusually static) or you've edited your memory to make the past align with the present (operationally common). Either failure removes the data the three-party relationship would provide.
You're running the practice when rereading produces specific, locatable changes in what you notice. I never saw that line before. The chapter that meant the most to me at twenty-three barely registers now. The minor character I dismissed is now the heart of the book for me. The locatable changes are evidence of the three-party relationship operating.
The reception-aesthetics literature in literary theory (Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser) has substantial work on the three-party relationship Popova names. The reader's horizon of expectations shapes what the text can deliver. The horizon changes across the reader's life. The text-reader relationship is therefore historical and developmental, not fixed. Popova is in the methodologically-defensible part of the literature.
The tension: the position can be misread as supporting relativism — there is no real meaning to the text, only what readers happen to make of it at various times. That's not what Popova is saying. The text is real. The text's meanings are constrained by what the text contains. The variation across readers is within the text's range, not unlimited. Some readings are better than others; some readings are wrong. The three-party relationship doesn't dissolve the question of textual accuracy. It complicates it.
A second tension. The practice requires rereading, which most contemporary readers don't do. The first-reading-only culture means most readers never experience the three-party relationship at all. The relationship requires returning. The returning requires time and substantial libraries that contemporary attention conditions don't easily provide.
Spend a year as a first-time-only reader. Each book is encountered once. You read substantial volume. By year-end you've read forty books. None of them have given you the three-party experience because none of them was reread. You know more than you knew. You haven't yet experienced what reading can do across time.
Spend the same year rereading. Fewer books — ten or fifteen, deliberately chosen from prior reading-life or from books that you suspect have more to give. By year-end you've spent serious time with each of them. Several have given you the three-party experience. The books have become companions across your own life in a way the first-time-only books haven't.
The two reading-years produce different readers. The first-time-only year produces a reader with breadth. The rereading year produces a reader with depth-of-relationship-with-specific-books. Both are valuable. Most readers don't do enough of the second to know what it gives.
Karlsson's claim about iceberg-and-temporal-text-accumulation runs adjacent. Karlsson writes for himself across time — the March-self writes for the June-self, who is a different person. The same principle operates on the reading side. The reader-at-twenty writes (or marks up, or holds) what the reader-at-forty will later receive. The continuity-and-difference operate on the production side and the reception side together.
Hari's interview-stance has an adjacent temporal element. Hari interviews subjects across years. The Chino Harden of 2011 is not the Chino Harden of 2024. Hari's relationship with Chino is itself a three-party relationship — Hari, Chino, and time. The interviewer who returns repeatedly across years gets material the one-time interviewer cannot get. Same principle, different content.
What Popova is naming reaches into two adjacent territories worth surfacing.
Psychology: Narrative Identity Across the Life Span — Contemporary personality psychology has substantial research on narrative identity — the way people construct continuity and change across their own life-stages through ongoing self-storytelling. The healthy narrative-identity holds both continuity and change, accepts both the prior selves and the current self, and uses the variation as evidence rather than as problem. Popova is naming the same operation from the reader-and-writer side. The two pages combined describe a single underlying psychological capacity that operates inside reading-life and inside identity-life simultaneously.
Eastern Spirituality: The Stream of Consciousness and Anatta — Buddhist tradition has long held that the self isn't a fixed entity. The self is a stream of momentary states connected by causal continuity but not by underlying identity. Popova's fluidity-of-self is the secular form of what the tradition has argued for two-and-a-half millennia. The traditions developed sophisticated technique for living inside the fluidity. Popova arrived at the same recognition from a writer's life. The convergence is robust. Both communities are pointing at the same fact about what a self actually is.
The Sharpest Implication The contemporary culture's emphasis on being your authentic self and not letting others change you runs counter to what Popova's frame suggests. The healthy self changes across decades. The fully-formed self at twenty isn't supposed to still be the self at forty. The change isn't failure of authenticity. The change is the work of being alive across time. The cultural insistence on static authenticity is therefore producing populations trying to hold positions they should have grown out of, which is operationally costly and personally exhausting. The fix is partly cultural — would require recovering older traditions that took fluidity-of-self as foundational. The recovery is slow because the contemporary marketing of authenticity is loud.
Generative Questions