Letter to my future self: what you learn when you reread it

You write a letter to the person you’ll be in a year. You seal it. You don’t reread it before the date. When the day comes, you open it, and you discover what you thought was important twelve months ago. It’s a very simple practice, and one of the rare ones that give a result you can’t get any other way.

Where it comes from

Writing to your future self isn’t a recent invention. Time capsules have been around for a long time, and services like FutureMe have offered since 2002 to email yourself on a chosen date. The manifestation community took up the idea as a practice, often blending it with the notion that writing the future “creates” it. We’re offering you a more sober version: the letter creates nothing, it records. And what it records, you can’t retrieve any other way, because memory rewrites everything.

Why seal it

The difference between a letter to your future self and a diary is the seal. A diary, you can reread tomorrow, correct, add to. A sealed letter freezes a version of you at a precise moment. You can no longer touch it up to make it look wiser.

That matters, because we underestimate how much we change. Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson described in 2013 what they called the end of history illusion: at any age, we admit we’ve changed a lot over the past ten years, but we predict we’ll change little over the next ten. The sealed letter is physical evidence against that illusion. A year later, you’re holding in your hands the version of you who thought nothing would move.

What to put in it

The temptation is to write a list of goals. “In a year I’ll have…” It’s useful, but if the letter contains only that, rereading it becomes a pass-or-fail review, and that’s a shame. Here’s what makes the rereading genuinely interesting.

• A snapshot of your life now. Where you live, with whom, what you do with your days, what tires you, what makes you laugh. Be precise and a little mundane. It’s the mundane that becomes precious a year on, because it’s what you’ll have forgotten.
• What’s worrying you. The real worry of the moment, the one that wakes you up. In a year, you’ll know whether it was worth it.
• What you want. One or two visions, no more. Write them as you see them, not as numbered targets. “I’d like to stop dreading Sunday evenings” says more than “new job”.
• A question. Just one, addressed to the woman who’ll read it. “Did you end up calling him?” “Are you sleeping better?” It’s often the line that has the most effect on rereading.
• Something kind. Not an instruction, not an “I hope you kept your promises”. A sentence you’d like to receive.

One page, maybe two. Write the way you talk. This letter has only one reader, and she knows you.

Choosing the date

A year is the right timeframe for a first letter. Long enough for you to have changed, short enough for you to remember writing it. Six months works if a specific vision has that deadline. Five years is a real gamble, to do once. What matters is that the date is set and that you don’t bring it forward. The urge to open it early is normal, and it passes.

What rereading teaches you

The first time you open a letter to your future self, you expect to check off goals. You discover something else.

First, that the worry of the time has almost always lost its weight. Either it got resolved, or it got replaced. That doesn’t mean it didn’t matter, but it gives you a sense of scale: what’s keeping you up tonight will probably be a footnote in twelve months.

Next, that some things you wanted very badly no longer interest you. That isn’t a failure. It’s the most useful piece of data in the whole exercise: what you let go of without regret was never really yours. Often, it was what was expected of you, or what seemed sensible.

And finally, that what really matters repeats itself. The thing you wanted a year ago and still want, in the same words, is the one that deserves a board, steps and attention. Two letters in a row saying the same thing are worth more than any personality test.

The letter doesn’t tell you who you’ll be. It shows you who you were, and what you’ve kept.

In Manifesti

The Letter to my future self closes on the date you choose, and the app doesn’t show it to you before then. It stays on your phone. On opening day, you can reply to the letter, and that reply becomes the first paragraph of the next one. If you’d rather have an outside recipient, the Letter to the universe follows the same logic in a different tone.

Common questions