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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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..
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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[ 630 ms ] story [ 3108 ms ] threadPer their footer:
> FutureMe™ brought to you by Memories Group Limited © 2002 - 2024.
> Yup - we've been sending letters to the future for about 22 years now
[1]: https://www.futureme.org/letters/public
Apparently, this service has survived since 2003. I hope it will continue to exist decades from now.
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 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.
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."
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.
You inspired me to dig into the vault.
Thank you!
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.
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.
What is less certain is: will the service still work and will the email pass the spam filters?
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.
https://dearfuture.carrd.com
Also the following day ( https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2015/04/23 )
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.
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.
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.
https://dearfuture.carrd.com
At least that's why I've never used this service and never will, even though I think it would be worthwhile.
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?
This coupled with my daily journal entries offers an interesting reflective process around the holiday season :)