If you could send yourself a letter in 20 years’ time, what would it say? Would you take a formal tone? After all, you might be an incredibly important person by 2030. Should you apologise for not going to the doctor about that dodgy knee? It might be causing even more problems by then. Or should you make a list of all the things you would like to have achieved by then, so that the future you knows whether he or she is a failure or a success?
Those are some of the important questions that you need to consider before using Future Me, a website that allows you to send your future self an e-mail message.
Back in 2003, when Facebook and Twitter were just a glint in a teenage boy’s eye, web designers Sly and Jay Patrikios set up the site to allow users to remind themselves about who they were, where they came from and, hopefully, to give themselves something profound to mull over. The messages were not supposed to be the kind that are left around the house for next Wednesday saying: “DON’T FORGET — put out the bins!”.
Since the site’s launch, Future Me has despatched into the ether more than a million messages, as users have sent future notes to friends and loved ones as well as to themselves.
For inspiration, it’s possible to browse some of them on the website and its Facebook fan page. They pull no punches: “Right now, in the past, you are living with a horrible lie,” one writes, “What have you done about it?”. “You should be independantly [sic] wealthy by now,” a 23-year-old advises his 27-year-old self. “Dear you procrastinating *******,” says another. “Have you begun school yet or do you still work at P with a lame 401k plan?”
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Sending a verbal slap to yourself is one thing, but what about those young e-mailers who decided years ago to send a stiff message to someone else, only to later regret their words? As one sender’s desperate plea attests, even time bombs with long fuses eventually explode: “I wonder, is there ANY possibility to cancel it? It’s an emergency.”
So when I decided to send my future self a message I decided to a) keep it personal, and b) be frank and to the point. “If you still have this e-mail address,” I wrote, “you clearly aren’t moving with the times. What happened?”