Two past selves battling in the present

- https://existentialcomics.com/comic/13

Existential comics have always had good content before they devolved into tropes. "How to quit smoking" was a rather deep story about what "will power" means in the context of smoking.

I think the missing piece in the paradox is that, while the comic correctly identifies that the smoker was struggling with his "past", specifically his past who had an idle thought about it being nice to quit smoking some time in the future -- but the thing it missed is that the *addiction* is also a thing of the past as well.

So the real struggle is not the present self who wants to smoke vs the past self who "decided" to quit -- it is more like the past addiction struggling with a past decision to quit.  The past struggling with each other, in the present.

But that clearly doesn't make sense. The past doesn't exist.  The past decision and past addiction are only projections of our idea that the past exists and that we identify with the flawed personality we remember in the past.

Once we get through the illusions, it's clear that our present self is still in control. The influence of the past is only as much as we identify with the past.  It's not so much as a question of will, than of a question of "which self" we want to identify with -- but that's a misnomer, because we don't necessarily have to identify with a past self at all.