Of course any path that would take a 10-years-younger peer of yours to your current identity would be strange, even somewhat stranger than the semi-random walk you yourself took.
I'm no longer sure what you mean by "your current identity" in that sentence, so let me try to taboo it.
Consider person X, my friend of ten years ago. I distinctly remember that ten years ago, X called himself George and described himself as having been born in Atlanta, whereas I called myself Dave and described myself as having been born in New Jersey.
Right now, I call myself Dave and describe myself as having been born in New Jersey.
Any path that takes X from where he was ten years ago to exactly the state I'm in right now, which includes calling myself Dave and describing myself as having been born in New Jersey, is very very strange... far stranger than the path I myself took, and stranger than .999999999 of the paths that were available for me to take.
Any path that takes X from where he was ten years ago to some state that shares some elements with the state I'm in right now, but not others, may be less strange than that. It may even be less strange than the path I myself took. It depends on which shared elements we're talking about.
I agree that many elements of the state I'm in right now don't matter very much.
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
I agree that many elements of the state I'm in right now don't matter very much.
Yea, e.g. lots of variables share the name "x". It's just denoting that which you talk about, and while a name can influence your upbringing (say it's a foreign name), i.e. while it'll help take you to your current utility function, at least I would not consider it crucial for identity purposes having reached the present time (yet it is essential for daily life, of course). Hopefully that makes my example clearer, if not steelman it as you see fit :), I think even without it my point is comprehensible.
A current article in Science reports on this study about how good people are at predicting what their future selves will be like. Not very good, apparently. Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard, with other colleagues conducted several experiments online, in which 19,000 people were asked about such things as personality traits, preferences in music, etc., answering about the present, about themselves 10 years earlier, and about what they expected 10 years hence. More precisely, this not being a longitudinal study, people of any age X predicted less difference with their X+10 selves than people of age X+10 recollected of themselves at age X. The effect did not go away with increasing age: 58-year-olds still expected less change in the next 10 years than 68-year-olds reported in the last ten.
Gilbert and colleagues call this effect "the end of history illusion," because it suggests that people believe, consciously or not, that the present marks the point at which they've finally stopped changing.
"What these data suggest, and what scads of other data from our lab and others suggest, is that people really aren't very good at knowing who they're going to be and hence what they're going to want a decade from now," Gilbert says.
Someone suggests an alternative explanation:
Another possibility is that people "might well anticipate substantial change, yet not know how they would change, and thus, just predict the status quo"
An actionable moral:
"The single best way to make predictions about what you're going to want in the future isn't to imagine yourself in the future, … it's to look at other people who are in the very future you're imagining," [Gilbert] says.