You don’t know your future self

Years ago, while I was at the University, I never thought about leaving my home country. I didn’t speak any foreign language well enough to communicate without issues, and I wasn’t interested in travelling just for the sake of doing it. I stayed happily in the bubble of my close neighbourhood, and I was pretty sure it would stay this way forever. My plans focused on graduating, securing a good job that would allow me to pay the bills, and perhaps starting a family and leading an everyday life in the society I grew up in. Fast forward fifteen years, and I live in Australia, surfing every day, learning new languages and hungry for new experiences worldwide. Although I’m the same person, my priorities have changed drastically, and everything I once believed I desired is no longer my life’s goal.

That brings the complex problem of identity. Identifying people on the internet is a significant technical challenge, and numerous services attempt to do it, sometimes more successfully than others. Are we the same people if we have the same names, dates and places of birth? In programming, relying on the underlying data to establish equality is usually sufficient, but philosophically, it is a much more complex issue. The paradox of Theseus is an excellent illustration of the problem. If a ship changed all its parts over time, is it still the same ship? Likewise, we are changing over time, both physically, as our bodies exchange cells, and mentally, as we understand new ideas and find ourselves in different circumstances.

Humans tend to think that we live in the final stage of history. Whatever came before us was just preparation for what is happening now. We make our choices based on what we know our future self would want, but is that always true? Based on my own experience, I would say we don’t know who we will be in the next 10 or 15 years, and we need to be careful in making choices that affect us at this time. We live in a particular time in the history of our existence and humankind’s history. From the perspective of future generations, we will appear very similar to the people who lived in the 19th century or even the Medieval Era. The same applies when we look at our lives in 20 years. The current stage of life, which seems so special, will blend with all others, including childhood.

With all that in mind, we can either fall into nihilistic thinking, where nothing matters because we don’t know anything, including our future selves, or feel liberated and embrace the unknown. We are not as important as we would think, nor are our choices. The time we live in now is not final, and we still have time to change and evolve. Furthermore, we should consider the future state of our lives and the earth so as not to harm those who come after us, including our future selves.