"To distinguish it from the traditional, commonsense view of personal identity according to which we are each a separately existing person numerically identical to ourselves over time—i.e., that personal identity is closed under our known individuating and identifying borders, what I call The Closed Individual View of Personal Identity, or simply Closed Individualism for short—I call my view The Open Individual View of Personal Identity, or simply Open Individualism for short. I argue for Open Individualism by showing the grave conceptual difficulties in supposing that traditional Closed Individualism is true, difficulties which point collectively in one of two new directions: either there exist no continuously existing, self-identical persons over time in the sense ordinarily understood—the sort of view developed by philosophers as diverse as Buddha, Hume and most recently Derek Parfit, what I call The Empty Individual View of Personal Identity, or simply Empty Individualism for short—or else you are identical to everyone. As so often in life, either we get too much or not enough: everyone or no one. Contrary to popular belief, Closed Individualism is not even a coherent view; the two coherent views are Empty Individualism and Open Individualism. Of the two, Open Individualism is the better view. Open Individualism is the best explanation of who we are."