There are many plans in life, and if there is a plan, there will be exceptions that break the plan.
Fitness plan, five times a week, can be overtime on Monday, dinner on Tuesday, too sleepy on Wednesday, lazy on Thursday, drinking on Friday, thinking every day, today is the exception, starting from tomorrow, must come according to the plan.
A week has passed, so find a new time node, start on the first day of the next month, this month is an exception. There are still many exceptions next month, so at the end of the year, I made up my mind, starting next year, this year is an exception.
If we continue in this situation, with exceptions year after year, when life is about to end and look back on the past, how to summarize this life? Is it the way it looks in the plan, or is it the way the plan is good but not fully implemented in accordance with the plan, or is it the way the exceptions are pieced together?
I believe that no bystander will take the appearance of that plan as the real state of life. This is an obvious problem in reality, but if you change the scene and transfer the externalized phenomenon into the heart, it will become somewhat complicated, and even reverse people's intuition.
As adults, we often have a sense of who we are, the "self" is often natural, and daily experiences, thoughts, and plans constitute the ongoing self. These egos scattered in time and space may be recognized by others, and may be recognized by oneself, but they are scattered in the end.
Whenever one mentions "me," there is a unified perspective that "I" is not an experience, a thought, or a plan, but a collection of all that exists as a whole. In this way, man cannot identify himself by specific descriptions, because they are fragments, but can only define themselves by the concept of unity.
Even people who are too lazy to think will always have a moment of soul torture - who am I? What am I like?
Based on this doubt, people will always have to give themselves some conceptual definition, even if it is vague. For example, I am an excellent person, a positive person, an unconventional person, a smart person, a person with a high moral standard, and so on.
Although the self in individual reflection is mostly given according to experience, people often cannot exhaust all experiences, and it is difficult to obtain a unified understanding of the self in complex experiences. Therefore, many times, the "self" in people's hearts is like planning fitness for themselves, which is a kind of planning.
It is inevitable that some people will say what kind of person you are, not to see what you have experienced, what you have done, but to see the future, in a new situation, you will decide what to do, this is the unique embodiment of you.
Since the "self" has a planning character, it is inevitable that there will be a conflict with the planning self. For example, I think I should be principled, but I change my attitude for a special reason; I think I should be self-disciplined, but I don't insist on sports; I think I should be kind, but I find myself hurting others fiercely...
It is reasonable to say that people should revise their understanding of "self" according to their own changes, such as clearly realizing that I am not so disciplined or kind. But adults are stubborn and don't change their perception of themselves just because an action contradicts the perceived self; what they do more is change their perception of that unexpected behavior.
So the thing that proved that I wasn't disciplined enough, or that I wasn't kind enough, was recognized as an exception by me as if it were overtime that bothered me to work out on Monday. In this way, I am still self-disciplined and kind, and the behaviors that make me appear to be not disciplined and kind enough are exceptions caused by external factors, which do not affect my evaluation of myself.
Interestingly, from the outside, if a person's plan can never be implemented, then when summarizing his life, he cannot use this plan to judge his life. But once one turns to internal evaluation, that is, self-reflection, people often change this standard.
For example, when I decide that I am good, even if there are many exceptions, I will exclude them from my goodness, and in the last stages of life, I can also summarize myself with this planned goodness - I am good, and if I continue to ask, then most of the time I am kind, except for some of the exceptions that are forced.
All this seems to stem from a small "cleanliness fetish" in human reason—not contradictory. For rational people, the sun rises is rising, it is impossible to rise and fall at the same time, a thing happens is happening, it cannot happen and does not happen, if an object is an apple and not an apple, it will cause a contradiction in the nerve conflict in the developed brain of man, and the rationally driven person will definitely pursue a so-called truth, that is, to exclude one in the contradiction and leave the other.
But life is not a certain kind of object, it is a summary of the long years, is a summary of human habitation in the overall perspective, the world does not have a thing called life, so it can be good, but also not good.
When a self-proclaimed good person examines his own life, those unkind behaviors obviously cannot be monitored by the contradictions of reason, and in order to strive for a complete and unified life, it is necessary to exclude those exceptions, and only when those "unqualified" behaviors are marked as exceptions will make reason at ease and make people's self-judgment stable.
Therefore, people have a lot of cognition of the self, but there are also many exceptions, people have a self-recognized "me", there are also countless exceptions to the "I", they are not contradictory, coexist, constitute a complete "me", but some people are not willing to admit it.