Do you think of your future self (“future-you”) as you or as someone else? Do you think of future-you much at all?

Admittedly, It’s really hard to pinpoint exactly what future-you will be like and what the exact conditions of the future will be. You aren’t omniscient, and life is too complicated to predict precisely. But, setting rough guidelines for who you’d like to be and how you’d like to behave informs your actions in the present. In personal development, we call these rough guidelines for who we want to be “visions.” A vision is a picture of the future, and your vision will consist of the circumstances, behaviors, and attitudes of future-you.

Everything you do in the present affects who you will become and what you will be doing in the future. Sometimes your present actions are imperceptible nudges toward a new future (eating slightly smaller portions or slightly more protein, having a morning routine, or smiling a bit more often), and sometimes present actions shake things up massively (quitting your job, starting a new relationship, moving across the country). How much do you consider the effects of your present actions on future-you?

Do your present actions add to who you will be and what your life will be like? Or, are you doing things that detract from your potential, reinforce a bad habit, or take away from your health and opportunities? We can’t always know the outcomes of our actions, but we can usually have a good idea if a behavior is healthy and will bring about a better future or if we would be better off refraining from a detrimental behavior. A simple way to think about this is the “+1 or -1” framework. A +1 activity or behavior is likely to make life better, and a -1 moves life in a worse direction. Your life will likely improve if you do more +1 activities and cut out more -1 activities. Your activities in the present can be a +1 gift or a -1 curse to future-you. 

I buy into this idea and feel a sense of pressure rising from this idea because this framework implies my actions have consequences. But because there are consequences, my actions feel meaningful. Rather than floating through life believing it doesn’t matter what I do, I find purpose in believing my decisions matter–at least to future-me. So, I try to string together more and more +1’s to invest in my future. -1 activities become meaningful challenges to overcome and bad habits to break. Overall, the +1 and -1 framework challenges me to be intentional about what I do and gives me the sense that what I choose to do matters.

Returning to this blog’s first question, do you see future-you as you or more like someone else? Are you in touch with who you will become, putting in work to gift future-you a better existence? Or, does future-you feel like a stranger, someone who doesn’t have much to do with you at all–someone who can fend for themselves?

Research from positive psychology indicates identifying with your future self is beneficial. The research suggests people who identify future-them as them, instead of as essentially a stranger, are more likely to take actions to benefit future-them. Identifying future-you as you is a useful idea if it leads to doing what you can to gift your future self a better life.

If you see future-you as you and are investing in the future you want to create, you’re on the right track! Keep doing the things that move your life forward. Continue working, building, and growing who you are so that in the future you will be the person you want to be. 

If you don’t really think of future-you as you, consider trying to bridge a connection to future-you. By connecting to the perspective that you will experience what future-you experiences, and it’s not some stranger or unknowable person (it’s you!), it may make it easier for you to take more +1 actions to set your future self up for success.

If you want to grow your connection to future-you (both in terms of you-ness and clarity), you can expand your awareness of the future, piece together a vision for where you want to go and who you want to be, and lean into the consequence of today’s activity’s shaping what happens in the future. Consider asking questions like:

What is my relationship with my future self?

Do I want to help them?

Why don’t I see future-me as me?

Why are we so divided?

We can gift our future selves better lives through what we do today. The more we see our future selves as ourselves, the more we want to do the required work. So, the big questions are ‘How do you see future-you?’ and ‘Do you think it would help you to more strongly see future-you as you?’