About The Next Self
The Next Self is a space for essays and ideas about identity, formation, recovery, healing, and social meaning. It begins with a simple premise: we are never entirely finished becoming. Experience changes us, interpretation gives that experience meaning, and response shapes what comes next.
The site explores those movements at the level of the person, relationships, institutions, and the wider social world. Its aim is not to offer easy answers, but to create a thoughtful place for reflection on how people understand themselves, respond to change, and imagine who they may yet become.
Why The Next Self
The Next Self grows from the conviction that identity is not fixed. We become through the ongoing movement of experience, interpretation, and response. What happens to us matters, but so does the meaning we make of it—and the responses that follow.
That process unfolds not only within individuals, but also within relationships, organizations, cultures, and the larger social world. The site therefore explores change at several levels at once: personal, relational, institutional, and social.
About Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
Robert K. Green, Ph.D., writes at the intersection of human development, identity, social meaning, organizational life, and change. His work draws on decades of experience in education, organizational leadership, theology, sociology, and the study of how people interpret and respond to the worlds they inhabit.
The Next Self brings those interests together in a public space for reflection and dialogue—one concerned not only with who we have been, but with how experience continues to shape who we may yet become.
