When I was fifteen years old, I told myself a single story of my future. I would get married to a woman and have children. It was a closed-door conversation about my future self. Unknown to me that the paradox of life and time makes it almost unpredictable to know what will happen to our future self.
It was only by looking backward I was able to connect the dots. When we look backward, we can see the enormous changes in who we have become, but when we look forward, we tend to imagine we never change from the person we are now.
We are conscious that things around us will change i.e., climate change, A. I and self-driving cars, but we don’t imagine ourselves changing. Our values and what we want in the future might be different.
A note: There is a probability that a few of us can know what we want in the future, but we don’t know the specifics of how it will turn out, and we won’t know how we will feel about it until we get there.
On an ongoing basis, you are constantly becoming a new person.
When you meet someone today and promise to be with them till death. You're making a promise that a stranger has to keep because our future selves might not share our current perspectives, hopes, and dreams.
Therefore, I say; it’s only magical that you will be lucky enough to find someone, who will be ready to evolve with you through these different changes and stages of your life, and constantly love the new person you become at each stage of your life.
Looking back, we can contrast who we were and who we are now.
So, stop worrying about the future self you do not know of and focus on building a better version of yourself now, and your future self will be proud to look back and give them a nod.
Be present now, spend time in spaces you do not traditionally find yourself in, learn views, and experience cultures different from what you would traditionally be involved with because we want our future selves to minimize the feeling of regret.
End the year by letting go of regrets about your past that you can see now by looking backward, and look forward to building a brighter future your future self would be happy to meet.
Happy New Year! I hope to see you in 2023.