Time travel
What Would Future You Tell Present-Day You To Do Right Now?
If you could go back in time, what would you do differently?
I cringe when I imagine how Future Michelle is going to judge me.
Future Michelle can point to some bad decisions and missed opportunities Past Michelle made and which Future Michelle was left to deal with.
As Present Michelle, I have a lot of sympathy for Past Michelle. I understand where she was coming from when she made those decisions — because I’m probably in the middle of making imperfect decisions right now. Future Michelle is not as nice, however. She can be a little judgy.
Mostly it’s smaller things.
Past Michelle didn’t wear sunscreen. In the early 1980s, we all thought we looked better with a tan. How much younger would I look today if I had stayed out of the sun or at least worn sunscreen, I wonder? But I wasn’t concerned with how I’d look when I got older. Only the present mattered to me.
Sometimes you can’t know until later that you’ve made a mistake. I know someone whose stock broker advised him, many decades ago, to buy Apple stock. It was cheap at the time. But he didn’t think Apple sounded like a company that was going anywhere, so he declined. Betcha he wishes he could go back in time and tell himself to buy the hell out of Apple stock.
I have more than a few things on my time travel list and I am sure you do, too.
Thinking of your past, present and future selves can help you make better decisions. It’s easy to ask yourself if Future You will agree it was a good idea to have that drink or eat that treat. Sometimes you know you’re going to hate yourself in the morning if you stay up late instead of going to bed. But just now there are bigger things to think about.
Right now, I’m wondering what Future Michelle is going to think of the preparations, or lack thereof, I’m making for possible disaster.
What’s going to happen with the war in Ukraine? Will it continue spreading westward? How will it affect the U.S.? Climate change is still happening. Economic disruptions of all kinds are brewing and who knows if or when another Covid variant or an entirely new pandemic might come along.
There’s no adequate way to prepare for some things. If a nuclear missile hits your area, all the cans of black beans you stockpiled in your pantry are going to do fuck-all for you. But there are other scenarios for worse things than most of us ever thought we’d see that we might be able to prepare for.
Should we all plant potatoes in the backyard?
Dig a well? Install a wood-burning stove, just in case? Good luck if you live in a city. Maybe you should buy a hobby farm out in the country and get some chickens. Should you move your money, if you have any, from one kind of investment to some other kind? Hell, if only I knew!
I’m thinking of investing in a grain grinder and a shitload of wheat berries. I’ve wanted to mill my own flour for years. Wheat berries keep practically forever, and freshly ground whole wheat flour would be great for the homemade sourdough I bake weekly (and have since long before the pandemic).
I keep thinking about the time I went to hear a woman talk about having lived through a war and her description about how her mother saw it coming and kept buying more and more flour and oil every week. But they did eventually run out and go hungry. I can only imagine her hungry mother bitterly regretted not having stockpiled even more.
If that were to happen here — from a pandemic or war or supply chain issues or an energy crisis or anything else — I’d be glad to be able to at least make bread to go with the stockpile of beans I keep on hand.
We Americans feel immune, but it could happen.
Have you read any first-hand accounts of what it’s like to not have any food in the house? I’m not talking about food insecurity, which is bad enough. Hunger exists in the U.S., but not starvation. I’m talking about the situation in which you and your family members can eat only a small amount of food each day and none at all sometimes for days on end. You cannot go to a food pantry or ask a neighbor for help because nobody has any food.
As a young mother, I read an account of a woman living through a famine who couldn’t feed all her children and it has stayed with me forever. Having no food for a starving child is one of the more horrific things I can imagine.
If everything goes on just fine and we all look back and realize we really dodged a bullet in 2022, Future You might think you went a little overboard.
But if everything does not go fine, a year or two from now you might wish you had done certain things. You will have to answer to Future You.
All of us have to make decisions based on the best information we have at the time — and we seldom have as much information as we need. We do not know what our world will be like in the next few years, but we have to try to prepare anyway.
The time is now.
This is exactly the period when Future You will want to return someday.
If only we could know what our future selves will want so badly to tell us.