What is identity? Why identity matters? Why should you care?

Identity is from the Latin word identitas which means "sameness". Philosophers describe
identity as “the relation that a thing bears only to itself”. Whatever makes a thing uniquely
what it is defines its identity, the same goes for human.
The problem is, everything changes, and when they do, they eventually become something
else. It begs all kinds of questions: Do you have responsibility and obligation to other people?
Do you have to keep promises you made, even when you are not the same “you” that made
those promises? If everything changes, when will you change enough to stop being you, and
become someone else?
Let’s check out some popular theories and opinions, and hopefully we can find the answer for
ourselves.
The persistence of identity.
Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that you can’t step in the same river twice,
implying that nothing is identical to itself, not you or the river.
But when will something change so much that it stops being itself? For example: paper is
made from trees, so when do trees stop being trees in the process of becoming paper? To
answer this question, we need to know about essential property.
The essential property is what make something what it is. But it’s hard to precisely identify
it. One might say a tree is not a tree anymore the moment it’s cut down, some might say it’s
when it’s been made into logs, and so on. So essential property varies with each’s
perspective.
The fact is we’ve all built our lives and our society on the expectations that individuals will
continue to be who they are, unchanged. But it’s not that we are unchanged, it is our essential
properties that are unchanged.
So what is the essential property of a human? Where and how can we find it?
This leads us to the 2 popular theories about personal identity: Body theory and
Memory theory.
Body theory says that because you remain in the same body from birth to death, your body is
what makes your identity stay the same. While memory theory says that the memory link to
your past self is what makes your identity persists over time, as far as you can recall.
But they both have their own problems. Our body is consistently changing, and our memory
can be altered or lost, and we can’t remember our first 1-2 years after being born.
One might even say there’s no such thing as identity. That identity is just an impression of the
mind, we are consisted of all sorts of things: our body, our mind, emotions, preferences,
memories, labels that are imposed on us by others. And identity is not real, it’s just a box
created by our minds to put all those things together.
Theory of survival
And then there is the theory of survival, which suggests that there’s no such thing as
essential property. People change and when they change, the degree of responsibility and
obligation also changes. So, when you made a promise back in elementary school to marry
someone, you won’t have to keep that promise because you are not that kid anymore, your
body and mind have all changed. And so we make effort to communicate with friends and
family, to keep ourselves constantly updated with the newest version of them. It creates the
illusion that they are still the same, unchanged.
Concluison
How about yourself? What make you you? Your appearance, your thoughts, feelings or your
menories? Do all of those define who you are? And even you are still you as years go by?
You are always changing and maybe you from this moment is completely different from the
past and could aslo be the future. You could be the type of person- you hated in the past- in a
few more years. So the final question is that how can we know who we are if we are
consistently changing?
With all those information, we hope that we’ve shed some lights on something, or maybe we
haven’t shed any lights at all, anyway thank you for your time.