Looking Forward, Looking Back

The person I am today is neither the person I was yesterday, nor the person I will be tomorrow.

This is not particularly profound, I know. But it is problematic.

For one, it leads me to think of my past, present, and future selves as distinct entities. My present self and my future self are so different that, all too often, my present self will decide to, say, read a book or watch a movie or spend time talking to a friend or write a blog entry, instead of completing a major reading or writing assignment. This is because my present self has full confidence that my future self will figure out a way to deal with this. My present self need not concern herself with the matter.

Once my future self becomes my present self, therefore, she is quite prone to high levels of stress. It is, of course, all the fault of my once-present-now-past self, and if the two of them would just communicate better life would be a lot smoother for future self. But it’s very hard to put oneself in another’s shoes, and present self just prefers not to think about what it must be like to be future self and to have to deal with the mess that present self leaves in her wake.

This differentiation between selves causes other problems as well. Like when I really, really want something out of life. I worry that my future self will decide she does not want that thing anymore, which means that I will never get it. For example, suppose I am 99.9% positive that Career A is the ideal career for me. And then suppose it requires an awful lot of hard work over the course of, oh, four or five years in order for me to get to the place where I am qualified for Career A in the first place. And suppose by the end of those four or five years, or perhaps sometime in the middle, I decide that Career A isn’t ideal for me after all. I know it’s silly to worry about such things, but I do. If I really, really want Career A (or anything else) I have to trust my future self to get it for me and I’m not always sure I do trust my future self. Sure, if it turns out that my future self doesn’t want it after all, I’m obviously not going to care at that point that I didn’t get it. But once again, my present self feels disappointed (in advance) by the possibility of not getting what I want because somebody else got in the way.

Thinking in terms of past, present, and future also makes it difficult for me to trust how I think and feel now. I often look back at my past self, either in memory or by reading old journals, and I am occasionally bothered by the fact that some of things I felt and believed and wanted back then are so different from what I feel and believe and want now. What this means is that I cannot know what my future self will feel and want and believe, which of my thoughts now will be invalidated by future experiences and understanding. That’s frustrating.

Fortunately, I am not frequently paralyzed by these thoughts. When I begin to become confused by the divide between past, present, and future, I just step back and tell present self to let future self take care of it. Sure, this may cause her excessive stress at some point in time, but she’ll find some way to deal with it. She always has before. My present self need not concern herself with the matter.