Why Should You Write a Letter to the Future?
Last week I received a handwritten letter in the mail, which is quite rare these days. The return address belonged to my church, so I assumed that the Brooklyn Unitarians were trying to collect some year-end donations, but instead a single sheet of rigidly folded printed paper came out of the envelope with a message scrawled in my hand. … “Dear you,” it began. And after a few sentences: “Best wishes, you.”
Oh right. I forgot about it. At the end of 2019 – incredibly long ago – at one of the Sunday services at First U, there was an invitation to write a letter to ourselves in the future: to ourselves 2020, a year that I assumed could not be better than the one I ended up with. (Pause for ironic laughter.) If in 2019 I didn’t know what the next 12 months would bring, his words still reassured me when I read them in the cold light of a pandemic December day. “2019 was a difficult year and a lot has changed,” he wrote. But he had the hope “that the passing of one more year means that you have found the courage to make positive changes in your life. But even if you don’t … every new day is a new chance. ” I’m not sure what I would celebrate with courage, but a hell of a lot has changed in December 2020. And I had such a chance. That’s right: every day is a new chance, and I appreciate the gift of perspective from me in 2019. This is why I plan to pay it off before December 2021 and write to myself again, which doesn’t exist yet.
You must do the same. You will appreciate it, I promise.
Can you send a letter to the future?
The advantage of getting my own letter to myself was both that I forgot I wrote it, and that someone else sent it for me, which made receiving it a journey. Unfortunately, without much organization, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to send a physical letter to yourself in the future (I certainly can’t vouch for the methodDoc Brown used at the end of Back to the Future II ). The US Post Office won’t keep the letter for you for that long, although it has written a program in China on its own website that promises to do just that . Some searches have brought up a few services that promise to mail out emails on a specific day in a few weeks or years in the future, but I wouldn’t put much emphasis on delivering them. Letter2Future swears that $ 5.99 is enough to ensure your letter gets sent within one month or 10 years, but the site doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2014. The company ” Gifts for the Future” , based in Romania, declares itself to be “time”. a capsule for emotions “and makes many promises on his About page (” Our plans include creating a network of ambassadors and safe houses around the world so that more and more people can send their emotions into the future “), but will not tell you how much anything will cost until you complete a fairly sizable registration process (to save you the hassle of phishing scams, you would need € 136 to deliver an email a year from now, starting today. The complete uncertainty makes it obvious why none a trusted company does not offer to do this for you, so aside from a liberal, inclusive religious community that could manage this process, it’s best to do it yourself.
How to send a letter to yourself in the future
I’ve already extolled the virtues of writing a physical letter to Future You, and you can do it without even mailing it. You should still treat it like a real letter and seal it in an envelope, but instead of throwing it in the mailbox, hide it somewhere in your home and then schedule an email delivery to Future You with a reminder to you. where did you put it. Google makes this very easy in Gmail , and since there is always the chance that you will miss this message in your inbox, you can set a calendar reminder as well. It’s not that romantic, but it will work.
Sending an email to the future, while not so challenging, is much easier. We’ve already written about FutureMe , a tool designed for this purpose. It has been around since 2002 (or, in the years of the Internet, forever). The process of writing and scheduling a note for yourself is pretty straightforward – make sure to use a personal email address that you can probably still access – with the added bonus of making it publicly available on the site upon delivery .
What to write
If you google “writing for yourself in the future,” you get a wide range of advice, from self-help mantras to career goals , but I don’t think you need to be programmatic about that. Think about what you would like to tell you about the past year — what it’s like to get through the hardships and what you’ve learned by doing so — and write that to yourself in a letter. Because while we would like to think that 2021 will be better than 2020, the future does not offer any guarantees.