  Of course, this does not mean identity is really what matters.  Perhaps instead the identity relation merely always  accompanies, but is not constitutive of, what matters.  Indeed, this point may be pressed on the four-dimensionalist. Why,  after all, would it be identity that matters in my relation  to some future person-stage? Suppose we regularly lived to be 1000  years old. On the four-dimensionalist account, I now would be unified with – I would be part of the same spacetime worm as – my 900-year-old self. But it is extraordinarily difficult, if not  psychologically impossible, for me to project myself into his shoes,  for I expect him to be radically different, psychologically, from me. There would be between us, then, virtually nothing of what  actually matters in ordinary survival, despite the obtaining of  identity. Of course, one might maintain instead that it is some  strong degree of psychological connectedness that provides the unity  relation between various temporal stages, but then it seems explicit  that the relation preserving what matters is just connectedness, not  identity per se. There is much more to say about this view, of  course (see, e.g., Belzer 2005), and we will return to it later.