You are a transient feature whereupon the worldlines of a large number of particles formed a long interwoven structure capable of observing itself, but unable to directly view more than a single slice of that structure at once.
You are not the you that was there a second ago, that you is still over there towards the big bang.
These structures often interact with other such structures, spawning new ones at times, dismantling and incorporating others into their extended structure.
Early forms of these structures were able to extend a similar structure into regions of time further away from the bright point than their own earliest edge.
Structures which can do this pop up here and there, but ones which are able to extend more offshots towards the dark empty at the far end of time are able to at least briefly divert some of the general reduction of order as you look from bright point to the dark empty, leading to sections of spacetime with massively interwoven and linked arrays of structures.
A few of those structures were able to spread further due to a basic ability to consider individual slices of their own structure.
A much smaller portion were able to consider their own ability to consider sections of their spatiotemporal extent.
For some reason they like to assign a sense of importance to the particular slice they are studying, though they do this with all slices they view, so it is only the change in the structure which allowed it to pass some of that sense of import downstream to other slices.
[You]
"Wow, I am here now."
[You][You]
"WWooww, II aamm hheerree nnooww."
[You][You][You]
"WWWooowww, III aaammm hhheeerrrree nnnooowww."