"Tomorrow Me"

A smart chap I know talked with me recently about “today me” and “tomorrow me” as if they were two different things. It was his explanation as to why we don’t eat right, stop smoking, drink less, save more etc which are all things that have an impact on your future but not that much on your today. His inference was that we actually are disconnected from our future selves and regard the future me as an alternative person.

As is obvious I have been mulling this over and it is a good conceptual framework to consider things from. The best example of “today me” and “tomorrow me” is having a great time at a party and reaching for that next drink knowing that there is a likely hood that you will awake with a raging hangover tomorrow. Apart from your mental impairment brought on by alcohol ingestion we all know that too many drinks makes us feel sick the next day and yet often times we carry on drinking... because the hangover is a problem for “tomorrow me” to deal with “today me” is fine and having a good time. 12 hours later when “today me” is hungover “today me” has all sorts of issues with “yesterday me” but gets on with drinking water, sleeping or whatever to deal with the hangover.    

So why the disconnect, well I think we casually think about time as a sort of a ribbon or a path that we trundle along, we have a sort of general idea of a linear progress. This is of course how it looks when you look back over your life. Looking forward we also have general outline of how it will go because we have all met people older than ourselves and the general plot line is somewhat standard we start as babies grow up live for a while and decline. Yes there are people who’s line is interrupted but we are all generally on the same path.

But it is a very wide path we can weave left and right as we go along and the future is not really a ribbon. You see when we are out partying we can actually chose which “tomorrow me” we get, drink lots of booze and become “hungover me”, drink nothing but water become “not hungover me” two completely separate dots in the future from where we can start. So projecting forward you potentially have a scattered lot of dots that you can choose to pick as your “tomorrow me” instead of a just trudging along the path.

I have now begun to think of life as like the milky way which appears in the sky as a strip of clustered stars so if you went from one narrow end to the other if forms a sort of a path (the way) but hoping form one star to another would give you an almost infinite number of ways to get from one end to the other and each star is not really connected to the last one. The possibilities of who “tomorrow me” might be do not need to relate to “today me”

Which brings us to just “me” because I decide what “tomorrow me” looks like. No matter how you got to be “today me”, be it skill and brilliance or bad luck and terrible circumstances we all know that “tomorrow me” is at least in part a function of “today me” and there is no one on the planet who is as interested in “tomorrow you” as you.

When you meet “tomorrow me” will you be pleased?