(Introduction: Your four-dimensional body)

Some people use meditation to learn valuable things about their deepest selves; some use therapy; some use psychedelic drugs. I use time travel.

Why connect?

My reasons, in no particular order:

Reflection: Look at your past selves to see how you’ve changed, and how you haven’t. You notice how certain decisions back then determined who you are. You see the tiny seeds of thought that grew into prevailing patterns and frames that you take for granted now. You see old intentions that failed to take hold, and big changes that had no intention behind them at all. You learn what worked and what didn’t; what was important and what wasn’t; this is wisdom.

Accountability: You’ll notice the missteps your past self made. This might motivate you to conduct yourself better in the present, because you know you’ll be watched by a different person in the future.

Consistency: In productivity coaching my job often involves connecting people to their past selves: “That sounds like a plan that really motivates you. But I want to confirm, you told me this other plan about two months ago. Do you feel differently about it now?” They say “oh yeah” and check on the old motivation: Is it still there? Has it evolved? I don’t automatically side with their past self, like “You made that plan so now you have to stick to it!” But they need to be in conversation with their old motivations to find the best path for their present self. Too much disconnection leads to the typical ADD pattern of always starting new plans but never following through.

How to connect

Journaling and reviewing

If journaling comes naturally to you and you can keep your journals somewhere secure, you’re all set. Whether you write daily, weekly, or sporadically; whether you write matter-of-fact reports or deep emotional expression: your journal is valuable as a record of your past self’s own thoughts.

(Keep those records safe, so they survive into the future. My journal is digital, synced across devices, and backed up to multiple cloud storage locations. It’ll outlive me.)

Periodically go back and read old entries (I have a reminder to do this monthly). You receive not only the text content your past self wanted to express, but the whole frames of mind that those familiar words invoke. Hindsight lets you see patterns and influences that were invisible to you at the time. What did you express about yourself back then, without even meaning to?

For example, if I look back far enough, I notice how my writing style changes. I find turns of phrase I used back then that I don’t use anymore. So I ask, “Where did that come from? What was I reading or listening to at the time that made me write that way? What people and ideas did I admire, and why?” When you journal, you think you’re simply recording what is; but with temporal distance, you notice how influenced you were by whatever else was going on at the time. The whole context reveals itself.

If journaling doesn’t feel natural to you, that’s fine, there are easy alternatives.

Your sent items folder

Your email application saves your sent messages and makes them searchable. That’s a record of your past!

You could start with a date filter: show the sent items from this month, one year ago. As with journaling, more is revealed in hindsight than you intended. You thought the email was just conveying the literal information, but now you can see your state of mind, your goals, and how you wanted to be perceived back then. The further back you look, the more you get the impression you’re reading the mind of a different person.

Your digital calendar

If you use a digital calendar like Google Calendar, you can navigate back and look at your schedule in the past. This is probably not very information-rich, but it’s something. See who you were meeting with, what you were prioritizing, and how you were spending your days.

Your old photos

Your personal photos are probably backed up to iCloud or Google Photos, in addition to whatever social media you post them on. What will you find if you scroll through your photos from this month one year ago? Photo apps do this randomly now, showing you “highlights,” but you can do it intentionally, too.

My wife does this almost daily: Facebook shows her posts “from this day, X years ago,” and she reflects on what she was doing, how she felt, and what was important to her back then.

Your old goals

I use a custom spreadsheet for tracking goals over time. If you regularly set long-term goals, then whenever you finish a season or year or other goal-period, you can look back and review that period. Did you get your goals? How? Or why not? What surprised you?

Construct a visual timeline

Draw a timeline of the events that make up the major arcs of your life. I used a digital tool that requires some setup, so I gave it its own page: Keep a visual timeline of your life. And below is one thing you could do with that information:

The evolution of ideas

Two of the categories I used in my timeline are about ideas: Philosophy (ideas or ideologies that were important to me; things I read that stuck with me) and Lifestyle (goals and values I had; insights about myself). I ended up with about 10 major things in each of those categories. Looking at ideas across time is interesting, because ideas are four-dimensional, like we are: they continuously grow and combine and take new forms as time passes.

So in a separate chart, just a flow chart with arrows (I use Scapple), I mapped how earlier ideas had caused or influenced later ones in my mind. Knowing the dates of each phase helped me get the order (and causality) right. Now I have a lineage of the major beliefs and values that have influenced my life up to this point. The contents are too personal for me to share publicly, but I want to show you the general shape of it:

That chart revealed all kinds of cool things to me:

• I can see how general curiosity and general creativity are two values that were there from the start / from early childhood. Their “cause” is too muddled to think about, but I see how they influenced the way I responded to other things I came across.
• I can see what media entered my view and when, and how it nudged me toward other media. Blogs, YouTube channels, books—you consume something, find that you like it, and then monkey-branch onto “more things like that,” and on and on.
• I can see which real-world events had the greatest effect on my ideas and values.
• I’m surprised at what a roundabout path I took to get to where I’m at. We are biased toward thinking we’ve “always been this way” besides one or two big changes we can remember. But the truth is I’ve had whole multi-month phases that I mostly forgot about. There have been more versions of myself than I thought.

A note on judgment

This exercise has you looking at your past self with the advantage of hindsight. You’re going to see a lot of surprises, mistakes, and misplaced confidence. Remember that this is about learning, not judging. Treat your past self like a close friend whom you respect. Do a fair evaluation, and where appropriate gently declare “That missed the mark.” For serious errors, forgive your past self. And extend gratitude where it’s due.

If you’re constantly a harsh critic of your past self, you’ll inevitably start to anticipate similar criticism from your future self. And that’ll give you an emotional backdrop of anxiety and resentment in the present, like “What’s the point, it’ll never be enough.” Avoid that vicious cycle! Be kind now, so your future self is kind, too.

Your relationship with your future self is what we’ll look at in the next post.

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