A letter to your future self: an example, a template and one rule

In 2013 Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson surveyed more than nineteen thousand people aged eighteen to sixty-eight. Some were asked to recall how much they had changed over the past ten years: personality, values, tastes, friends. Others of the same age were asked to predict how much they would change over the next ten. Then the two were compared.

People of every age remembered changing a great deal over the previous decade. And expected to change little over the next. A thirty-year-old described an enormous gap between themselves and their twenty-year-old self, and assumed that at forty they would be much as they are now. The authors called it the end of history illusion: at every point in life it feels as if we have finally become ourselves, and what follows is detail.

A simple fact about letters to the future follows from this. The person who opens it will differ from you more than you think. So it is worth writing not to "me in a year" but to a stranger who happens to have access to your memories.

Why write to a stranger at all

First, to bring them closer. In 2011 Hal Hershfield and colleagues showed people their own faces aged by computer, and afterwards they were willing to put noticeably more into retirement savings than a control group shown their ordinary faces. To the brain, the future self is a stranger by default, and we do not like paying for strangers. Anything that makes that person more concrete, an aged photo or a letter, tilts decisions in their favour.

Second, to push today further away. In 2021 Yuta Chishima, I-Huai Liu and Anne Wilson, during the pandemic, asked people to write a letter to themselves a year ahead, or the reverse, a letter from themselves a year ahead to their present self. Both forms reduced negative feelings compared with controls, and the mechanism was a sense of distance: the hard moment became a point on a line rather than the whole line.

A letter to the future self and a letter from the future self reduced negative feelings equally; the mechanism was a sense of temporal distance from the present moment.

So there are two different letters with two different jobs. A letter to the future brings the future self closer and helps you decide on their behalf. A letter from the future makes the present smaller and helps you get through it. The template below is for the first, but the second can be made from it by swapping author and addressee.

One rule: a date you cannot move

Before the template, the main thing. A letter to the future works in one case only: if it cannot be read early.

This is not about willpower. While the letter sits in your notes it remains a text you know. You reread it in a week, fix a phrase, add a paragraph. By the delivery date nothing in it is something you do not remember, and the "a stranger is writing to me" effect never happens. For a letter to become a letter, enough distance has to pass between writing and reading that you forget what is in it.

So the date has to be handed to someone or something that is not you. A paper envelope given to a friend with a date on it. A scheduled email. A feature in an app that hides the text until delivery day.

The template: five questions instead of "dear me"

A blank page and the salutation "dear me" usually end in generalities. Five questions work better because each demands something specific, and specifics are what will be interesting a year from now.

1. What is taking up the most room in my head right now? One sentence, no explanation. In a year this is the first thing you will want to check.
2. What am I afraid will have happened by the time you read this? Name it directly. In my experience of rereading, most such fears look like someone else's a year later, and this is the most useful line in the letter.
3. What am I hoping for but not saying out loud? The hope you keep quiet so as not to jinx it or look naive. A letter is the one place you can.
4. What have I decided, and want you to check? One decision, made recently. Not "be better" but "leave this job by March", "stop texting him first", "book the doctor". Your future self will check whether you were right.
5. What would I like you not to forget about today? Not an event, a detail: how the flat smelled, who called, what was on the table. In a year the events are remembered, the details are not, and the details are what bring the day back.

An example

Imagine the letter is written by someone, call her Vera, in October, for a year ahead. The example is made up, but the shape is the one that works.

Taking up the most room right now is a move that has not happened: every evening I open the listings and choose nothing.

I am afraid that by October I am still in this flat and still opening the listings.

Hoping, not out loud: that in the new place there is a desk by a window and I draw again.

Decided: to apply before December even if I have not found the perfect option. Check whether I applied. If not, do not scold me, but ask why.

Do not forget: this morning the cat slept on the box I packed and never unpacked. It was funny and a little embarrassing.

Five paragraphs, eight minutes. In a year Vera will open this and look at the fourth one first. If she applied, the letter becomes a witness. If not, it becomes a question asked by the one person she cannot lie to.

What not to write

Advice to yourself. You do not know the circumstances of the person who will read it, and they will know all of them; advice from the past is at best endearing. Lists of goals for the year also age badly: they read as reproach, and a letter should read as a meeting. If you badly want to write about goals, write them in the shape of question four: one decision and a request to check.

When to write

Any day will do, but two work especially well: the day you decided something, and the day you are afraid. The first fixes the decision before you know how it turned out. The second does what Chishima and colleagues showed: it turns today's fear into a point on a line. I will have a separate piece on New Year letters in December, but there is no need to wait for December: the end of history illusion runs all year round, and the person who will read the letter is already beginning to differ from you. And if a whole letter is too much, start with one line in a journal: that is a letter too, just delivered as "a year ago".