Today I want to talk about the power of Future Me. I’ve found this idea to be incredibly useful in two very different ways, but both of them help me live a life that is much less stressed, less dramatic, and much more satisfying. One of those is to ask myself whether Future Me will care about this situation, and the other is to declare that the situation is a problem for Future Me (and therefore not for Present Me).
Will Future Me Care?
The first of those ways is to ask myself if I will care about this situation a year from now (or sometimes 3 years, or 5 years)—in other words, “Will Future Me care about this issue?”
I talked about this briefly in my review of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, because that’s where I was first exposed to this idea, but I wanted to expand on it briefly. Many times, when I’m upset about some situation, it’s because I’m imagining all the negative consequences that will occur because of it. When I get in this state, though, it’s easy for me to not really stay connected to reality. If my thinking is along the lines of “But what if …?”, it’s a pretty sure bet that I’m not thinking clearly.
There’s one trick that I’ve found to be really helpful in this regard that I’d like to share. That is that I don’t try actually try to imagine what things will be like in the future; that’s a recipe for more “What if?” kinds of thoughts. Rather, I imagine that the problematic situation is already in the past. If this thing was already a year ago, or 3 years ago, or 5 years ago, what effect would it be having on me now?
I almost always find that the situation isn’t as dire as my mind wants to tell me that it is. If I’m not feeling well today and I cancel plans that I was looking forward to, I could be understandably upset. But, if those plans were a year ago, the odds that I’d care about it now are really small. If I’m not able to finish some task that I promised I’d do today, I might be upset. But, if that unfinished task was a year ago, I’m probably not even going to remember it today, much less be upset about it.
This is Future Me’s Problem
The second way that I use the power of Future Me to make my life better is to declare some situation to be a problem for Future Me. For a long time, I used to be unable to do this. Any problem that I had would occupy all of my thinking. Since I was unable to think about anything else when I had a problem, I would devote as much mental energy as possible to solving it immediately, and continue to do that until it was solved.
Now, obviously, some problems can’t be solved immediately, and letting go of trying to solve those results in stress reduction. But, that’s not where the true magic of this strategy is. Instead, the true magic lies in the problems that could be solved now, but don’t have to be.
For example, I’m currently looking at going back to graduate school. I’ve got some prerequisite courses scheduled in the spring, and then (hopefully) my degree program will start in the fall. That leaves a gap in the summer. What am I going to do during that gap?
The answer is that I don’t yet know, but more importantly, the answer is that I don’t yet need to know. Since I don’t yet need to know, I have declared the problem of what to do over the summer to be a Future Me problem, and I’m not spending any time actively thinking about it.
This has benefits beyond just the fact that I’m not worried about the summer right now. It’s entirely possible that something will happen in the next few months that will change my perception of what my summer options are, or my perception of what would be the most beneficial. It’s entirely possible that some new ideas will come to me in the next few months. By waiting for those changes in my thinking to happen before making a decision, I get to make better decisions.
And, it doesn’t have to be Far Future Me, either. For example, I wrote most of this essay between 6:00 and 7:00 this morning. Since I don’t publish until 10, I decided to just put it down for a bit and see what came to me—and then I realized that doing that is exactly an example of the strategy I’m talking about. If you’ve ever drafted an email and then saved the draft to look at the next morning, you’re doing the same thing.
If you’re in the habit of trying to solve everything right now, or get everything done before moving on to the next thing, maybe try experimenting with the idea of setting some things aside for Future You. I suspect you’ll be glad you did.
(Note to those of you who were expecting the Zeroth Step today; I actually forgot that I said last week that was going to write about it. 😊 It’s still coming, just not today.)