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Letters to Your Younger Self Are a Scam
The Futility of Trying to Tell Your Younger Self Anything Useful
There’s a genre of thought experiment that involves writing letters to your younger self.
You’re supposed to impart hard-won wisdom, spare your past self some suffering, maybe tell them to buy Bitcoin or avoid that regrettable haircut.
I’ve been thinking about what I’d write in such a letter, and I’ve concluded the whole exercise is doomed from the start.
My younger self wouldn’t listen.
Worse, if they did listen, they’d undoubtedly fuck it up in some other // alternative // novel and creative way I can’t even anticipate.
The problem with advice-giving in general is that nobody takes advice. Your mate asks whether they should break up with their mediocre boyfriend, you give them a thoughtful analysis of their relationship dynamics, and three months later they’re still together and complaining about the same things.
But the Blogosphere’s favourite “letters to younger selves” genre has a special kind of futility baked in.
You’re not just battling human nature’s foundational resistance to advice. You’re fighting the specific human nature of the person you used to be. And that is futility itself.
