I've been writing to Future Me every birthday since I was 17. I'm now 32. In my very first letter written at age 17 and addressed to the college version of myself, I urged myself to resist peer pressure, keep making art, and maintain my innocent nature.
As the years went on, the letters alternated between despair and hope. The letter writer turned into a pothead, then an alcoholic, then an alcoholic pothead who couldn't make art anymore.
Many of the letters described long, meandering walks through New York City through eyes that didn't feel part of reality, in a body that was always outside of the circle.
After years of ache for love, a relationship blossomed, then spoiled; an anticipated marriage never materialized, and then the whole thing collapsed died. The letter writer fell very ill, left the city, then started all over in a small town.
I got my last letter a year ago. That person seems a lot closer to the person who wrote that very first letter. That person makes art again. Spends most of their time in nature. Is back in college studying something entirely new. The pothead and the alcoholic and all the toxic relationships are long gone. The slate feels washed clean.
There is a sense of innocence returned. Joy, excitement, hope for the future. Gratitude for the all wisdom accumulated between that first letter and the most recent.
Starting at 16 years old I wrote a letter every birthday to my 30 year old self with ideas of who I want to become and how I ought to judge my success. I hoped when I turn 30 to open all of them up and realize how much I accomplished would be satisfying.
Through the project, I actually discovered two things. First, I estimated a rate of progress that exceeds the real possible magnitude of accomplishment by about two lifetimes. Second, that the storylines I want in my life and the opinions I have about them are stable across time, even if they are dormant for many years in a row. Whether this is the effect of personality or an ability to maintain memory beyond the capacity of attention I don’t know. But then again, maybe those are both the same thing.
I used to keep a diary (that I stopped keeping due to lack of time) and it echoes your experience to a large extent. I mostly wrote about how I was feeling or what I did that day or what I was planning to do in the near future.
I also vastly underestimated the amount of time and energy it would take to excel in certain things (for example, I wanted to compose and play music, excel at math and physics, write fiction books, play tennis, all at professional levels) and overestimated the difficulty of a few others (namely escaping poverty/becoming wealthy). Though, I suppose this may be the consequence of work being such a major timesink in one's life and my having the fortune of various opportunities in my life.
Similarly, my desired storylines and opinions have all been roughly the same since then. There have been occasions where they shifted, but then returned as if to equilibrium after a brief amount of time. As someone who views themself as having a terrible memory, I suspect it may have less to do with memory and more to do with some stable characteristic with emergent qualities. To extend the equilibrium analogy - a spring doesn't need to "remember" its equilibrium position to reach it - after experiencing friction for enough time, it'll reach it again.
It's nice being able to see a reflection of my past self though. I think I'll try to keep a diary again.
I started doing the same thing a few years ago, but on New years day instead of my bday. It is way better to just see where your head was at and what you wanted from the year ahead than to make a list of resolutions/achievements. Really wish I had started at 16 that is invaluable.
I do the same thing periodically, except with voice notes. Whenever I feel like I am in a big moment in my life, or have a new understanding of a concept, I’ll record a note talking to myself. I wonder how different these would be if I wrote them down with pen and paper vs an audio recording.
I journal either on the PC (Scrivener) or on a notebook. I have tried audio but it is difficult to access "that one thing you said about that topic and you want to review it". Unless the messages are 30sec long, it would be annoying to track it.
Scrivener (no affiliation) is a word processing SW for writers. So I am writing the book of my life (chapters, etc.)(imagine OneNote enhanced for writing books).
You can create a 2030-01-01 Chapter (folder) and drop notes into that about changing your investment risk, etc. I guess you could leave a note to your own Calendar, but when I use Scrivener I flow better - I guess it's the UI that makes the difference.
I’ll check out Scrivener. I haven’t revisited my voice notes in a while but I would probably use some sort of LLM to decode them into text to make them easier to search.
I did similarly (once though, not every year) and dreaded its arrival - I remembered enough to know some misses/failures - it arrived and I instantly archived it, without reading more than I couldn't help but catch a glimpse of.
I would say don't do it young and naïve, it's just depressing, except that I am now at least mature enough to realise one's probably always too young and naïve to write like that to the older self. What we really want is to hear from them isn't it, but writing's no substitute at all.
16 year old me got more right about the world than I ever predicted he could. I encourage you to read it. Especially to see how much about your younger self your current self gets wrong! The opposite effect of depressing.
At the end of all of my reading even though my younger selves couldn't hear it I whispered to all of them: "You turned out okay little one. Rest."
No promises but maybe. At 16 my family was breaking down so it's all a bit too personal. I'll see if some are worth sharing publicly. If I do I'll respond back here again to let you know.
You know what they say, people underestimate what they can do in a year and overestimate what they can do in a month. Now switch out "year" and "month" for other respectively shorter timeframes too.
Best use I’ve found is for when I have a huge decision to make. I’ll email myself at some time after the decision must be made; right when I might be having regrets. I explain to my future self how hard it is to decide right now and why the correct choice isn’t clear. Usually with some encouragement of “I hope you know we made the best choice we could”
Of course, I also send some occasionally on birthdays or when I’ve just give through something dramatic — a reminder to future me to remember.
My letter never came. :( I spent ages writing it and describing my feelings and what I planned for my future. I had detailed my improvement plan for 10 years. Randomly I remembered this service and was disappointed since I didn't receive the email.
Another alternative, if you use a digital calendar consistently, is to create a calendar event in the future and write the letter to your future self in the event notes.
> My letter never came. :( ... I remembered this service and was disappointed since I didn't receive the email.
Google (gmail) has a send later option which I use all the time as a reminder for all kinds of things. It's been 100% reliable. I actually have an email setup to be delivered 16dec2024. I use it for all kinds of medium/long-term (often mundane) reminders.
I like how this approach trusts your future self to look back at these files, while the other methods implicitly distrust the future self motivation to look back at your present self.
Can we deeply trust the concept of our future self as being equivalent and worthwhile of replacing our present? Do we treat that future self almost like a child of our own?
I absolutely trust my future self to go back and look at the files.
I do not think I would have started this practice without knowing this about myself.
I do wish I made more of an effort to leave these notes. I have in my archive chat logs from various messaging services and there is contextual headspace which clearly has changed over the years without me really knowing it. For example: I had a conversation back in 2006 where it sounded like I thought very positively of Apple as a company. I have no recollection of thinking positively of Apple back then, and certainly not since.
There's no guarantee that the calendar event will exist 50 years in the future as well.
Gmail might not exist or be replaced, text files might suffer corruption, cloud hosting could go off line or the database could die or a physical letter can be lost or destroyed.
Really need to use a multitude of options to ensure delivery in the future.
> This derisks the possibility that the "future you service" goes under, taking your cherished letters with it.
I’d say it replaces it with a different set of risks (new phone, cloud service goes under, you start using a new account, etc). It’s a hard problem to solve over long time periods.
This is a really cool idea! That said, after I sent a letter to my future self, it automatically signed me up for several email lists, tried to get me to download the app, and pestered me to become a "member." No site like this needs any of those things.
After a 4-week backpacking trip (via NOLS), you're given the opportunity to write a letter to yourself that they would send to you in the future (can't remember how long, maybe a year). After 4 weeks of living out of a backpack in the Alaskan mountains, your perspective changes. They knew this and wanted you to give yourself a reminder of that perspective after it has faded back to the complexities of normal life. You really develop a different, and imo healthier, mindset about life.
Unrelated but how did you like the experience? I've been thinking about trying to carve some significant time out for myself to do something outside of work like a NOLS trip, hike the Appalachian Trail, etc.
Curious about this as well. And this might be a dumb question, but the NOLS trips have age ranges, with the top group being 23 and older. Do NOLS trips lean younger / would someone in their 30s feel out of place?
It was a great experience. You learn a lot. You manage stressful situations, whether that's a disagreement about a travel route or food -- food stress becomes real. To your point, my age group was probably 16-23 and things did become a little cliquey at first. But at some point or another everyone will have to rely on someone else and your age doesn't matter at all. Someone in my group had previously done an Outward Bound expedition and compared the NOLS experience to be much more adult-friendly.
i can relate to this. sometimes coming across new philosophies can change your life's priorties and values quite a bit: for instancing learning about taoism.
I highly recommend doing this. I also highly recommend not doing it digitally.
I recently came across an email I'd sent to myself a decade ago. It was a serendipitous find and could've easily been lost for all time among the 100K emails floating around. But the process of writing it is worth it, and the reading of it some time later can be deeply rewarding.
Hah.. the Swiss Post has an app that lets you design a postcard and send it, it even has a "every user can send 1 free postcard every day" that cool kids use a meme-printing service. I feel like they should also offer a "print-a-letter-in-the-future and send it to user" service. As a bonus they can probably track the movements of their customers because of their "address change" service (if you move houses and use this service they'll let companies know of your new address). And it's the Swiss Post, it shouldn't be disappearing any time soon..
Must've been weird at the beginning, to have presumably more than (chances of the first ones being for only one year thence?) a year accepting letters but making no deliveries, other than to test.
Dear Future Me,
Do not open the portal. I RePeAt Do NOt OPen... F̷̝͉̹̀͆̓͛̅̀̐͘͠ͅŏ̵̼̺͈̼̱̠̤̬͔̳̥̩̿̈̄̒̂̿̾͜͠͝r̸̢̧̗͕̮̫̝̤̤̥̮̃̈̈̿̋̊̕ ̶̙͚̞̣̿̌͐̈̿̔̊̃͆̆̅͗́̆͂t̵͖̎̚h̴̡̼̲͕̳͈̮̿̉̂͜͜ͅȩ̸̺̦̗́̈́̿̈́̾̾̀̇̾̎̊͆̕͠ ̵̢̟̫̲̯͚̯̫̼͚̜͉͑̋͂̄͘͜ĺ̸̰̭͓̟̬͚̹̺̅̉͌̏̀̊̽̔͒͑̍͑̆͝ǫ̸̡̡̩̻͙̬̥̳̭̹̭̲̿̂̀͛͊̇̏̆̅͂̊̍̀̂̔̊̌v̴̘͈͉͈̖̤̠̗̘͍̘̱̰͕͉̲͙̓̓̕ḙ̴̡̛̥̹̣̱̝̭͍̇̂̾͘͘ͅ ̵̲̰̪̥̠̅̂̈́̾̑͒̈̌͛̿̌̇̾̑͠͠͠ǫ̶̡̡͖̖̭̣̗͖̳͇̻͔̱̑͊̊̇̍̓̕f̷̥̳̲̭̥̹̯̩̪͎̫̓́,̴̛̤̟͍̖̟̭̥̤̳̹̮͙̪̫̅́̾͛̾́̀̊̚͝ͅ ̷̧̢̛̫͇͍͔͉͉͖͕̙̄̄̀͛̒̽̑̋͆͊̅̂̏͒̚͜d̷̬͈̐o̷͈̦̗̰̾͋̂̄̎̆̿́͒͌̋͑͘̚͝͝͝ ̴̡̡͉͕̥͔͍̟̼̬̗̯͕͂͐͆̊̋̆͝͝n̸̡̟͖͍͓̹͙̟̥͈̥̪̠̒̐̒̒́͗͌͝͠ǫ̷͕͈̘͈͙͇͙̫͈̖̓̾̿̈̔͒̂̒͛̍̃ͅt̶̨̫̰̯̫̥̥͚̤̱͍̮̞̼̠̆͑́͗͛͐̑̐̃͘͜͝͝ͅ ̸̡̢̗̱̜͖͇̀̒̀̂̿͆͛̐̆͆͘͝õ̸̻̭̤̮͎͙̜̣̤̫̊p̶̫͎̯̮͉̬̯̻̰͉̗͎͆́́̓̃̚ę̵̛͇̍̆̇͐͌̈̏̍͆̔̈́͌̋́ń̴̝͉̼̱̯̜͍͚̬̬̠͕͕̊̕͘͝ ̸͔͋͆̀͒͑͐̇t̶̜̝͚͉̤͚͈̮̯̾̊̎̃̋̽͌̈́̑̋̚̚͘̕͝͠͠h̷̪̳͎̭̬̣̘͍͂̂̀̽̓̅̓̇͘͘e̸̛̝̾̅́ ̵̧̧̛͎̗̱̬͎̺̋̋̉̈̿̿̽͗̈́́̚͘͠ͅg̷̠̍́â̶̢̨̼̝̙̯̣̯̗̬͖͛̀t̶̢̰̪̘̘̭͔̲͐́͛̿̈́͌̇͐͘e̵̪̮͈͙͕̥̫̫̒̌̎̓̅̅̎͌̈́̀̓̂͑͘͝w̶̧̲͚̪̜͓͈̩̭̦̻̯̩͔̑̂̓̋a̶̘̱̥̺̣̭̳̳̫̦͙͇͐y̷̢̤̻̲̝̜̗̥̼̝̻͔̰̭͌̏̐̒͊͋̚͠
This is something you can do at the post office at Burning Man.
If you write to someone in the city, someone will deliver your letter/card.
If you write to someone outside the city, they will pop it in USPS in Gerlach.
If you write to someone no longer living, they'll deliver it to the temple.
If you write to your future self, someday, someone may put it in USPS.
I love this idea. My high school our english program had us write letters to ourself 10 years in the future. Such a joyous surprise when that teacher actually sent the letters 10 years later.
I wonder though - How is this different than journaling? Doesn't a written record from the past you can refer back to in the future accomplish the same goal?
I would say that with journaling you're not guaranteed to look back at specific notes, you need somehow to force yourself to do so and have a way of easily finding that specific note at a specific point in the future. Sending a letter fixes this issue.
I did this once and the resulting message was incredibly depressing so I don't think I would do it again. For me there is no value or point in engaging in such actions. It's probably only worth it if you have a positive outlook on life.
I was wondering too what I would use this for. I'm a bit worried that this would become a depressing exercise if goals or hopes do not come true. And boring if they do come true. I think I'm just not sure yet what a sustainable way to use this service is.
Also I wish you the best and hope your outlook on life gets more positive.
Over the course of 13 years, I wrote 365 Future Emails to my 2020 self, one for each day of the year. It was pretty interesting to see myself "age" in fast-forward like that. The first handful of letters were pretty lame -- very short, lolsorandom-style stuff. Towards the end I was using it more like a journal, often writing many paragraphs per email.
What did I glean from it all? I don't know. It wasn't as mindblowing as I had hoped, frankly. Mostly I was struck by the sad reality that I had failed to predict what would be interesting to my future self. It reminded me of how, as a teenager, I had filled many pages of my journal talking about an MMORPG I was addicted to, rather than how I felt towards my siblings, or my spiritual beliefs, or a funny joke I heard at school, etc. Another sad irony was that the older I got, the more I wrote -- but when I read the letters, the more recent they were, the less interested I was in them. I wanted to read thousands of words written by my 15-year-old self, but all I got was a few sentences. Oh well. Maybe those longer passages will be interesting to 40-year-old me.
I have done it with the past self (no I don't have a tachyo-something anti-telephone, just a theoretical exercise). You can look at the obvious mistakes you have made. How much more could you accomplish or get out of life if you just applied those few paragraphs of instructions. Then look at it and wonder, in 10 years from now what kind of letter would I write to my present self, what obvious things am I missing now...
The way I journal, I have a bash script that looks for today's date in past years, and opens them alongside the current entry.
It was fascinating when I started doing it because before it, I didn't really think about future me reading past entries. So it has shaped how I journal, and it has also made me journal more often, because I don't like the days where there's no past entries to read.
Cool and simple. Animal Crossing also has the ability to send letters to your fellow villagers (who might also be real people), including yourself. And as far as I can remember, you can specify an arbitrary date in the future.
Penning a letter to your future self is a deep dive into self-reflection and personal growth. It acts like a time capsule for your current thoughts, hopes, and dreams, creating a bridge across the years. This exercise lets you track changes in your life, aspirations, and mindset. It provides insights into your personal development journey, showcasing how challenges were tackled and goals shifted. It's a special way to document your life's journey, offering a moment to reflect and renew your sense of purpose. I love this idea.
Making a plan to make each month count is something I thought about recently. Something to remember each month by.
It's a big enough chunk that you could for example take a trip somewhere, lose 10 lbs, or learn a new skill.
It's a bit of a change of perspective to think of your life in terms of months.
Kind of like not to think of the world as countries, but inter connected cities.
I sent myself many emails in the last 15 years with Futureme. I am reading the sad times and remember how I felt those days. It also fascinated me how much I improved in 15 years; mentally and financially. There were some about loved ones' cancer treatments and every year the letters got more depressing. Hopes diminishing in emails feels very strange. Regardless of what it made me feel I recommend this to my friends. I write myself every few yes with it.
Also, their Cron scheduler must be working its ass off. God knows how many are waiting to be sent out.
I sometimes think about the problem of sending a message to someone in the far future such that they'd be guaranteed to receive it, regardless of their location on earth or attentiveness to the arrival time of the message.
It's a fun creative thinking exercise.
You can 'cheat' a bit by thinking of ways of sending a message such that ~everyone on earth would get it at the delivery time, including the intended target. But personalizing the delivery (thus adding privacy) makes the problem far, far more difficult.
I do similar with just THOUGHTS. I send my future self a thought, often a question, and I get the answer albeit vague and difficult to decipher. Then when that time eventually comes, I answer my past self because at that moment I am receiving the past question. I know this sounds weird but that's fine. I'm not able to get any answers past ~10 years from now which is kind of unsettling, but I guess we can't live forever.
I address my journals to my future biographers. I also maintain a Spotify playlist for my biopic's soundtrack. And I leave digital footprints for ingestion by future AI models.
A while of doing this has shaped my thinking generally. The tone moves along the serious-not-serious spectrum. I can speculate wildly and grandiosely about my plans and ideas from a just joshing or just in case perspective, and then reconsider them seriously.
As a kid, using this site or some other, I wrote an email to myself and received it some 15 years later. That was awkward. I don't really know that guy.
That’s a good insight right there. I journal and use futureme and the biggest takeaway is how we really are different people at different times in life. (But with common threads you have to squint to find.)
I personally write myself a letter once a year around new years. Covers what happened over the last year, my 3-5-10 year plans, goals, family/friends/health, photo of myself, etc.
Then the next year rolls around and I compare the current year to the previous year, see if I am hitting my goals & trending in the right direction. Helps me hold myself accountable.
There's a "Dead Man's Switch" that gets triggered in the absence of you fulfilling some action to keep it from triggering. Once you for whatever reason cannot suppress the trigger, the switch is activated and whatever actions from it are performed, like send a letter to a bunch of people detailing some secret thing. Purpose is so your adversaries are constantly in check and can't destroy you. An example is that I was hoping infamous island owner Jeffery Epstein would have one that would reveal all the wrongdoings of the many elites in the event of him being captured or dying. To my knowledge, no such switch though. And also people don't seem to care much about powerful people doing gross things.
Interesting that they changed back their business model. I used the service a few times but stopped when they started forcing users into a monthly/yearly subscription to write more than one letter per year or so.
As someone who's had access to production data in the past, if it's any consolation: you see all that PII, all those order forms, and you just...don't...care.
I would write a letter in a text file, password encrypt it in a zip file, upload zip to Google drive, put a reminder in Google calendar for the date i want to open, with link & password.
Don't use GMail. Google mines all of your communications - for advertising and other commercial activities of its partners; and also makes those communications accessible and searchable by some branches of the US federal government, and perhaps other parties.
There are less-privacy-invading alternatives - both paid and gratis - which you should consider. I'd particularly suggest trying options that are not based in the US, the UK or Canada.
(The harder part is avoiding conversing with people who use GMail, but the more of us leave it, the more that can be realized.)
I'm broadly aware that the product is free so "I am the product" with gmail
I don't really care though. None of what you've mentioned, even if true, would stop me from using the product, mostly because of the convenience and extremely high switching-cost.
Your best bet is to register your own domain. Preferably with an unrestricted generic TLD like .com or .net as you may lose the right for a specific TLD at some point, for example if you are using your country TLD and you move.
What is less certain is: will the service still work and will the email pass the spam filters?
Of course, and one of my e-mails also exists since almost 25 years. But (unless I own my own domain, as someone suggested, and don't fail renewing it), it's hard to predict what will happen in such a long timespan. Not quite, but a bit like betting that I'll still be living at the same street address.
Well, if you change your email address, I guess you just don't receive the message. I don't think there's any way around that unless you maintain an unbroken chain of email forwarding from older addresses.
As the years went on, the letters alternated between despair and hope. The letter writer turned into a pothead, then an alcoholic, then an alcoholic pothead who couldn't make art anymore.
Many of the letters described long, meandering walks through New York City through eyes that didn't feel part of reality, in a body that was always outside of the circle.
After years of ache for love, a relationship blossomed, then spoiled; an anticipated marriage never materialized, and then the whole thing collapsed died. The letter writer fell very ill, left the city, then started all over in a small town.
I got my last letter a year ago. That person seems a lot closer to the person who wrote that very first letter. That person makes art again. Spends most of their time in nature. Is back in college studying something entirely new. The pothead and the alcoholic and all the toxic relationships are long gone. The slate feels washed clean.
There is a sense of innocence returned. Joy, excitement, hope for the future. Gratitude for the all wisdom accumulated between that first letter and the most recent.