Why You Should Care About Your Future-Self Today

What about today? Today is the present. Many people say that the present is the only thing that matters because you cannot change the past and the future is not yet here.

That sounds wise and right. But your life today is the result of the decisions you made in the past. Wouldn't you have done a lot of things differently in retrospect if you had known then what you know now?

Anyway, sometimes I would like to go back in time and revise some of my decisions.

Of course, I can't do that, and we shouldn't waste too much time thinking about what we could have done better. We really cannot change the past, and thinking about it is not suitable for our mental health.

But we should be clear about one thing: The future is definitely coming. One day our future self will merge with our present self. We should not rely on the fact that tomorrow will never happen because that would mean speculating on our imminent death.

So every future will become today at some point.

Now, of course, it is true that we cannot determine our future. Coincidences cannot be influenced. Much of what happens, happens without our doing.

But on the other hand, we can very well influence the probability that something specific will or will not happen in the future.

If I regularly drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes today, it is much more likely that my health will be worse in a few years than it is today.

Unfortunately, we humans are not very good at putting ourselves in the place of our future selves. The idea of getting lung cancer at seventy is abstract for a forty-year-old.

If that same forty-year-old knew that he would drop dead half an hour after smoking a cigarette, he would have no problem stopping immediately.

I write this without blame because I myself am guilty in this respect. I may have stopped smoking cigarettes, but I cannot stop smoking nicotine. I smoke e-cigarettes now

I also do not do sport regularly enough. I often let my work tie me to my desk instead of going running three times a week. I do not do nothing at all but, in any case, too little.

I can only write credibly about the problem because it concerns me.

Today I am grateful that as a teenager, I said no when I was offered cocaine. Had I not done so, I would undoubtedly be a broken junkie today without a loving wife, living in a dump, and having a broken liver.

Sometimes it helps me think about good choices from the past to avoid bad decisions in the present.

When I'm sitting at my desk and don't feel like writing another article or working on my new book for another hour, I think: Where would I be today if I hadn't held out earlier?

What would I be if I hadn't written thirty novels and a few hundred articles? What if I had simply got up from my desk every time I didn't feel like it?

I'd certainly still be in my 9 to five job, wondering if that's all life has to offer, and I'd have to make do with a lot less money.

And then I realize that I would have to go back to that old life if I didn't have the discipline today to finish this article, this book or this exposé.

I don't want to do that to my future self, so I stay strong and keep writing.

We are all someone who was just some future me in the past. We all will be the future me at some point that we can only guess at today.

So shouldn't we ask ourselves what we can do to make our future selves a better life?

We should because this is about us. In reality, we are never just our present. We are always past, present, and future at the same time - in every moment, from breath to breath.