How to Send Something
to Your Future Selfan entirely practical guide to time travel

Suppose you could travel back in time and meet your younger self.

You arrive carrying years of accumulated wisdom.

You know which worries weren't worth worrying about.
Which mistakes became useful.
Which people mattered.
Which strange impulses were worth following.
Which roads apparently led nowhere but somehow brought you exactly where you needed to be.

So you find your younger self and announce:

Your younger self looks at you.

And then he proceeds to do exactly what he was going to do anyway.

Excellent.

Apparently, information from the future has a compatibility problem.

You can tell someone:

• Trust yourself.
• Don't worry so much.
• This will pass.
• You don't need everyone's approval.
• Follow what feels alive.
• One day this will make sense.

And these can all be perfectly good sentences.

Unfortunately, some sentences require approximately seventeen mistakes, three inexplicable afternoons, a heartbreak, several cups of coffee and one extremely suspicious coincidence before they become readable.

The words haven't changed.

The reader has.

Perhaps wisdom isn't merely something we learn.

Perhaps it is something we gradually become capable of understanding.

Maybe the useful question isn't:

Maybe it's:

Because we do that constantly.

A book placed on a shelf.

A sentence written in a journal.

A friendship begun.

A skill practised badly.

A tree planted.

A strange drawing you don't quite understand.

A project started because something about it simply said:

At the time, none of these things need to explain themselves.

They simply enter the world.

And then, perhaps years later:

*click*

“Oh.”

Pause.

“THAT'S what that was for.”

This considerably simplifies the engineering requirements for time travel.

No wormholes are necessary.

No faster-than-light particles.

No grandfather paradox.

You simply alter the environment that your future self will eventually encounter.

In other words:

This can include knowledge, kindness, art, savings, friendships, ridiculous experiments, half-finished ideas, gardens, notes to yourself and emergency snacks.

Your future self then wanders through a world partially constructed by previous versions of you.

Occasionally discovering packages.

Imagine walking along a road in a videogame.

Beside the path sits a health potion.

You don't currently need it.

You don't know who put it there.

You pick it up anyway.

Three hours later you're crawling out of a dungeon with two hit points remaining.

Suddenly:

Ah.

Perhaps life contains something similar.

Not necessarily because an invisible cosmic logistics department has carefully placed every object according to the Universal Item Distribution Schedule.

Although we cannot conclusively rule out paperwork.

But because our lives continuously extend beyond the present moment.

What we create today becomes part of the landscape someone will inhabit tomorrow.

And that someone includes us.

So occasionally, when something feels worthwhile without having an obvious immediate purpose, perhaps it doesn't need one yet.

You don't have to manufacture a grand destiny around it.

Just place the health potion beside the road.

Maybe nobody needs it.

Maybe future-you walks straight past it.

Maybe twenty years from now someone finds it and says:

And somewhere outside the normal jurisdiction of causality, your present self receives a tiny administrative notification:

You won't know what it means, of course.

But perhaps the kettle will plink at exactly that moment.

And you'll think:

“Huh.”

Then carry on with your day.