In this paper, I trace ethnographically how the new might arise from what exists, if only slowly and over a long duration; how it might create ruptures in people’s sense of personhood and relations; but also how it might get absorbed into these. I do so in the context of social mobility in postwar and contemporary Philippines. Here, social mobility entails the production of new kinds of person; it is enabled by prior relations and modes of being a person, while also transforming these, including in less positive ways. Taking the vantage point of those born in the wake of upward mobility, I examine the place of refusal to follow established and valued (but previously, novel) paths to upward mobility. I focus on the story of my classificatory cousin, Patrick, who, on the cusp of becoming a seaman, decided to pursue other lines of work, thus creating new, and deepening existing, breaks in his kinship universe. Alongside these breaks were various suspicions, accusations, and explanations that held open the possibility of repair. In attending to Patrick’s story, I argue for the need to broaden the temporal horizon of the new beyond the immediate; and to see how multiple kinds of the new emerge in and get folded into persons, their lives, and relationships.