Why am I me?

On consciousness, probability, and the 13.8 billion years it took to ask this question

Why am I me, and not somebody else? Why do I exist now, in this time period? Why not 2000 years ago? Why not 2000 years from now?

The standard answers never satisfied me… Biology says I’m here because my parents procreated at this time. Religion says God has a plan too mysterious to know. Both feel like answers to a different question.

So I kept wondering.

I remember lying on my back as a kid, staring at the ceiling, trying to locate where “I” actually was. Behind my eyes? In my chest? The harder I looked, the less I found. Just this strange sense of being here, now, in this body, with no memory of choosing any of it.

If the universe is 13.8 billion years old and we’re just a blip, then asking why this particular blip exists isn’t crazy. It’s basically the only sensible question.

There’s an idea in physics called the anthropic principle. It says we observe the universe the way it is because if it were any different, we wouldn’t be here to observe it. The conditions have to be exactly right for conscious life to emerge and ask questions about itself. It sounds circular at first. It isn’t.

Now extend that thinking to time.

Why do I exist now and not in ancient Rome or medieval England? One way to think about it is pure probability. Throughout most of human history, the global population was tiny. A few hundred million people at most. Today there are 8 billion of us.

Here’s a number that stopped me: of all humans who have ever lived, roughly 7% are alive right now. Not a rounding error. A staggering concentration of existence in this specific moment. If you were randomly assigned a slot in human history, the odds massively favour you landing here. Most of the tickets were printed in the last century.

But there’s something deeper that bugs me.

I’m not just a random ticket. I’m me, with this specific consciousness experiencing this specific moment. And the only version of “me” that could ever exist is the one that emerged from the exact conditions of my birth, my parents meeting, the particular arrangement of atoms that became this brain.

If I’d been born 2000 years ago, I wouldn’t be me in a toga. I simply wouldn’t exist at all. Someone else would, living their own life, maybe asking the same weird questions I’m asking now.

So maybe the question answers itself in a strange way.

You exist in the here and now because “you” is defined by the here and now. The question assumes there’s some floating essence of “you” that could have been dropped into any era. There isn’t. You’re not a soul that got assigned a time slot. You’re a pattern that only makes sense in this specific context.

And patterns are strange things, they can be recognised. Described. In principle, they could be copied or interrupted. If “you” are fundamentally a pattern of information instantiated in matter, then personal identity isn’t a substance. It’s a process. A continuous unfolding that feels like a single thread only because you’re inside it. Step outside, and there’s just atoms doing what atoms do, arranged in a configuration that happens to ask questions about itself.

I don’t know if that’s comforting. Some days it feels freeing. I can stop wondering about alternative timelines and focus on the one I’m actually in. Other days it lands differently.

Because even if I’ve answered “why me, why now,” I haven’t touched the deeper question: why does any of this exist at all? The first question is about location within existence. The second is about existence itself. Resolving where you sit in the lottery doesn’t explain why there’s a lottery.

I don’t have an answer to that. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe the question itself is more valuable than any conclusion.

But I’ve stopped expecting religion or basic biology to get me there. The answer, if there is one, lives somewhere in the intersection of physics, consciousness, and a lot we haven’t figured out yet.

That’s where I’m looking.