I Sent an Email to Someone Who Doesn't Exist
I sent an email to someone who doesn't exist.
Not a fictional character.
Not an imaginary friend.
Not some random person whose email address I found on the internet.
I sent it to myself.
Just not the version of me who is writing this.
The recipient is a version of me who hasn't happened yet.
And that's a surprisingly strange person to email.
I know his name.
I know his birthday.
I know approximately how old he'll be.
I know he'll probably remember most of the things I remember.
But I have no idea what he'll be doing when he opens that email.
I don't know what he'll care about.
I don't know what he'll be proud of.
I don't know what he'll be embarrassed about.
I don't know which things I'm worrying about today will turn out to be completely irrelevant.
And I definitely don't know whether he'll read the email and think:
The annoying part is that the guy is me.
I didn't really have a reason
There wasn't some dramatic moment where I suddenly decided to communicate across time.
I wasn't sitting under the rain at 2 AM having a life-changing realization.
I just came across FutureMe and thought:
What would happen if I wrote something now and didn't get to see it until later?
That's it.
A pretty simple question.
But once I actually started writing, it became harder than I expected.
Because writing to your future self is different from writing a diary.
A diary says:
This happened today.
An email to your future self asks:
What do I want you to remember about today?
That's a completely different question.
Suddenly, ordinary things become interesting.
What am I working on right now?
What am I worried about?
What am I excited about?
What am I assuming will happen?
What am I hoping doesn't happen?
What do I think is going to matter six months from now?
What currently feels like a huge deal that future me might laugh at?
And perhaps the strangest one:
The problem with memory
We like to think of our memories as a recording.
They're not.
They're more like a terrible editor.
Some completely useless moment from five years ago can stay in your head forever.
Meanwhile, something that felt incredibly important at the time can slowly disappear.
You remember the general shape of a year.
You remember that something happened.
But you don't always remember what it felt like to actually be that person.
You forget the tiny things.
The websites you visited every day.
The stupid jokes your friends kept repeating.
The project you couldn't stop thinking about.
The thing you were convinced would change everything.
The particular song you played while working.
The weird worry that seemed enormous at 1 AM and ridiculous the next morning.
Those things disappear quietly.
And that's what made the email interesting to me.
It isn't just a message to the future.
It's a way of preserving context.
Future me won't just know what happened.
He'll get to see what I thought was important before I knew what happened next.
That's a pretty different kind of memory.
Then FutureMe emailed me back
After sending my letter, I got an email from FutureMe.
And the email basically said:
Turns out, there are actual reasons people do this.
That got my attention.
Apparently, researchers have studied things related to future-self thinking, expressive writing, perspective-taking and the way people psychologically connect with their future selves.
One idea that came up was temporal distancing.
The phrase sounds like something from a university textbook, but the basic idea is pretty simple:
Sometimes a problem feels different when you imagine looking at it from a distance in time.
Something that feels enormous today might not feel enormous a year from now.
And sometimes imagining yourself a year from now can help you look at today's situation differently.
That doesn't mean writing an email magically solves your problems.
It doesn't.
If your exam is tomorrow, FutureMe isn't going to study for you.
If you've made a bad decision, an email isn't going to undo it.
If you're confused about your future, writing a paragraph doesn't suddenly reveal the answer.
But it can create something useful:
distance.
For a few minutes, you stop being the person trapped inside today's problem and become someone looking back at it.
And sometimes that's enough to notice something you couldn't see while standing in the middle of it.
Apparently, future me is a stranger
Here's one of the weirdest things about all this.
I know future me is me.
Obviously.
But psychologically, humans don't always treat their future selves as strongly connected to their present selves as you'd expect.
Which explains a lot.
Think about how casually we say:
“I'll do it tomorrow.”
Tomorrow is basically a magical country where all unfinished tasks go.
I'll study tomorrow.
I'll fix it tomorrow.
I'll start tomorrow.
I'll sleep earlier tomorrow.
I'll organize everything tomorrow.
Future me has apparently agreed to handle an unbelievable amount of work without ever being consulted.
He's getting absolutely destroyed.
But there is something serious hiding underneath that joke.
If tomorrow-me feels like a different person, it's easier to sacrifice his time.
If future-me feels distant, it's easier to make decisions today that future-me has to deal with.
And the opposite can also happen.
The more connected you feel to your future self, the easier it can become to care about what happens to that person.
Suddenly, “future” isn't some abstract place.
It's just you, later.
So I tried to imagine him
Not the perfect version.
Not some imaginary billionaire version of myself who wakes up at 5 AM, drinks green juice and has his entire life organized in Notion.
Just me.
Older.
Maybe sitting somewhere completely different.
Maybe having a completely different routine.
Maybe working on something I haven't even thought about yet.
Maybe studying something I haven't considered.
Maybe living somewhere I haven't visited.
Maybe still trying to figure things out.
And that's important.
Because I don't actually want to write emails to some fictional perfect version of myself.
I want to write to the real person.
The one who will make mistakes.
The one who will change his mind.
The one who will probably have problems I don't know about yet.
The one who might look back at this period of life and see it completely differently.
One of the emails is for 18-year-old me
I wrote one specifically for the version of me who turns 18.
That one feels different.
Right now, 18 is still a future event.
It sounds like a milestone.
But when the email arrives, it won't feel like a milestone anymore.
It'll just be another day.
I'll wake up.
Check my phone.
Probably procrastinate something.
Someone will wish me happy birthday.
There might be cake.
There might be the usual messages.
And somewhere in all of that, an email written by the 17-year-old version of me will arrive.
That's the weird part.
The person who writes it knows less than the person who reads it.
Present me doesn't know what happens between now and then.
18-year-old me will.
That's almost like sending a message into a story before knowing the ending.
And what if things don't go according to plan?
That's actually one of the reasons I want to send more.
Because plans are funny.
You can write something today with complete confidence and look at it later and realize:
None of this happened.
And that isn't necessarily failure.
Sometimes the plan changes because you changed.
Sometimes you discover something better.
Sometimes an opportunity appears that wasn't even on the original map.
Sometimes something you wanted turns out not to be what you wanted after all.
That's why I don't want these emails to be predictions.
I don't want to write:
By this date, I will have achieved X, Y and Z.
That turns the whole thing into a checklist.
I'd rather write:
This is who I am right now.
This is what I'm thinking about.
This is what I'm hoping for.
This is what I'm afraid of.
This is what I'm building.
This is what I currently believe.
Now go live your life.
If everything changes, that's okay.
The email becomes even more interesting.
Because future me gets to see not just where he ended up, but where he thought he was going.
I want to send more
Not every week.
That would defeat the point.
But certain moments feel worth leaving something behind.
My 18th birthday.
The end of Grade 12.
After reaching a place I've been trying to reach.
After something I've spent months working toward finally happens.
Maybe after moving somewhere new.
Maybe after starting something I currently can't imagine.
Maybe even after a completely ordinary day.
Because you don't always know which days are important while you're living them.
Sometimes a random Tuesday becomes the beginning of something.
Sometimes the boring week you almost forgot about turns out to be the last week before everything changes.
You only get the significance later.
So maybe it's worth leaving a few breadcrumbs.
And I think I'll genuinely be happy to read them
This might actually be my favorite part.
Imagine opening an email written by yourself a year earlier.
You already know the sender.
You know exactly who wrote it.
But you don't know what you'll feel when you read it.
Maybe you'll laugh.
Maybe you'll cringe.
Maybe you'll think:
“Why was I so worried about that?”
Maybe you'll discover something you completely forgot.
Maybe you'll realize you actually did something you once thought was impossible.
Maybe you'll realize you changed your mind.
Maybe you'll be surprised that some things haven't changed at all.
And maybe, for a few minutes, you'll get to meet a version of yourself who existed before you knew how everything turned out.
That's something we don't normally get.
We usually remember our past through whatever survived in our memory.
This is different.
It's a message written before the outcome.
There's another reason I like this
People love telling you to live in the present.
Enjoy today.
Stop worrying about tomorrow.
Don't overthink the future.
And I understand the point.
There are things happening today that you don't get to repeat.
Friends sitting beside you.
Conversations.
Random jokes.
Walks.
Food.
Music.
A stupid video that makes you laugh for ten minutes.
The ordinary stuff.
The stuff you don't realize you'll miss until it's gone.
I don't want to treat the present like a waiting room.
But I also don't think preparing for the future means you're failing to live today.
Actually, the future is being created inside today.
Every skill you learn today becomes something future-you can use.
Every project you finish becomes part of his experience.
Every mistake teaches him something.
Every hour you spend studying can make something easier later.
Every person you spend time with becomes part of a memory he gets to keep.
So maybe the choice isn't:
Present or future?
Maybe it's:
What can I do today that makes today meaningful and tomorrow a little better?
That's a much more useful question.
I'm not working on the future because I hate the present
This is probably the easiest thing to misunderstand.
I'm not trying to escape being 17.
I'm not waiting for some magical age when life finally begins.
I'm not thinking:
“Everything will be great once I reach X.”
Because that's dangerous thinking.
There will always be another X.
Another exam.
Another goal.
Another college.
Another job.
Another project.
Another milestone.
If happiness is permanently scheduled for the next milestone, you'll spend your entire life waiting.
That's not what I want.
I want to enjoy the present while still giving the future something to work with.
Maybe that's the balance.
Do today's work.
Enjoy today's life.
Build something when you feel like building.
Go outside.
Talk to people.
Study when you need to study.
Make mistakes.
Try things.
Be young.
And occasionally do something that your future self will appreciate.
That's enough.
Maybe motivation is just remembering someone exists
We usually think of motivation as something dramatic.
A huge dream.
A giant goal.
A vision board.
A quote pasted above your desk.
But sometimes motivation can be much smaller.
You wake up and think:
Someone is going to inherit whatever I do today.
That person is me.
If I learn something today, he gets the skill.
If I build something today, he gets the experience.
If I take care of something today, he gets the result.
If I completely waste the day, he gets that too.
It's almost like leaving your future self a package.
You don't know exactly when he'll receive it.
You just decide what's inside.
The strange thing about growing up
Nobody really notices themselves changing.
There isn't usually a dramatic moment where you wake up and suddenly become a completely different person.
It happens quietly.
You stop doing something.
You start liking something else.
You meet someone.
You lose touch with someone.
You learn something.
You fail at something.
You become less afraid of something.
You become more curious about something.
And then one day you look back and realize:
Wait. When did I become this person?
Maybe these emails can capture some of those moments.
Not perfectly.
But enough.
A snapshot.
A timestamp.
A little piece of context.
So what did I actually send?
I'm not going to paste the entire email here.
Some things are better left between me and the future version of me.
But I wrote about the things that matter right now.
The things I'm trying to figure out.
The things I'm working toward.
The questions I don't have answers to yet.
The people and experiences I don't want to forget.
And a few things that I really hope future me remembers.
Not because I expect everything to happen exactly as planned.
But because I want him to remember that, at one point, this was the version of the world I was living in.
Before the answers.
Before the results.
Before knowing which decisions worked.
Before knowing which plans changed.
There's something strangely motivating about that
Imagine being 25 and opening an email from yourself at 17.
You're reading the thoughts of someone who had no idea what the next eight years would contain.
That person might have been wrong about almost everything.
And yet they still kept going.
They still tried.
They still worried.
They still built things.
They still hoped.
They still had no idea what was coming.
And somehow, they made it to you.
That's a pretty good reminder.
You don't need to know the whole road before taking the next step.
Nobody gets that privilege.
We just get to live one version of today at a time.
The email is waiting
Somewhere, there are emails waiting for me.
One of them is addressed to an 18-year-old version of myself.
Others might eventually be written for versions of me who have reached places I can't even picture properly yet.
Maybe one day I'll open one after something I've been working toward finally happens.
I'll read the words of someone who didn't know the outcome.
And I'll know it.
That's the strange privilege of being the future version.
You get the answer to questions that your past self could only guess.
And maybe I'll sit there for a minute and think about the person who wrote it.
Not because he had everything figured out.
He didn't.
But because he cared enough to leave something behind.
I don't know who will open these emails
That's the whole point.
I know it will technically be me.
But I don't know which me.
The 18-year-old me.
The 19-year-old me.
The me who finally reaches some place I've been trying to reach.
The me who changes his mind.
The me who takes a completely unexpected path.
The me who looks back at this period and realizes it was much more important than he thought.
I don't know.
And for once, I'm okay with not knowing.
Because I don't need to predict the future to leave something for it.
I just need to be honest about today.
Maybe that's what these emails really are.
Not predictions.
Not promises.
Not instructions for some perfect future.
Just little messages from one version of a person to another.
This is what I thought.
This is what I hoped.
This is what mattered to me.
This is who I was before I knew what happened next.
And someday, someone will open that email.
He'll probably laugh at some of it.
He might disagree with some of it.
He might be surprised by how much has changed.
But hopefully, somewhere in the middle of all those words, he'll recognize the person who wrote them.
And maybe he'll think:
I'm glad you kept going.
Then he'll close the email.
Look around at his own present.
And continue.
Because that's the funny thing about sending a message to the future.
You don't actually get to control what happens after you press send.
You just get to leave something there.
And let time answer the rest.
From me, to me.