The Fall of My Teen-Age Self (And Time Travel: What If You Met Your Future Self?)

I've been thinking about teen-agers. I have one myself now, and of course I was one once—in a different world at a different moment—and can remember the feeling. Everything was extremity. It still is. Four waves of feminism, digital connectivity, a global wellness movement, the injunction to “be kind,” the commonplace “it gets better”—none of it seems to have put much of a dent in teen-age misery, especially not of the kind that concerns me. Watching girls gather outside the multiplexes this past summer, choosing between “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” I thought, Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Brittle, impossible perfection on the one hand; apocalypse on the other. I have never forgotten the years I spent stretched between those two poles, and there was a time when I believed that the intensity of my girlhood memories made me somewhat unusual—even that this was what had made me a writer. I was disabused of that notion a long time ago, during the early days of social networks. Friends Reunited, Facebook. Turns out there’s a whole lot of people in this world who feel they never lived as intensely as they did that one particular summer. “If teen-age me could see me now, she’d be so disgusted! ” I said that to a shrink, a few years ago. To which the shrink replied, “Why assume your fifteen-year-old self is the arbiter of all truth?” Well, it’s a good point, but it hasn’t stopped me from carrying her around on my shoulder. I don’t suppose, at this point, I’ll ever be rid of her. (...)

Sometimes I ask myself: What would teen-age me do with her misery now? Where can a twenty-first-century girl go these days to retreat from reality? (If the answer “the Internet” comes to mind, I’m guessing you’re either over fifty or else somehow still able to imagine the Internet as separate from “reality.”) I worry that the avenues of escape have narrowed. Whatever else I used to think about time, for example, the one thing I never had to think about was whether or not there would be enough of it, existentially speaking. But now the end of time itself—apocalypse—is, for the average teen-ager, an entirely familiar and domesticated concept. I don’t remember taking Y2K seriously, but I bet I’d be a 2038 truther now. And to whom would my funeral orations be directed? My realm of potential envy would no longer be limited to just the people in my school or my neighborhood. Now it would stretch to as many people as my phone could conjure—that is, to all the people in the world. I’d like to think Prince would still be mediating my world to some degree, but I know he would be infinitely tinier than he was before, reduced to a speck in an epic web of digital mediation so huge and complex as to seem almost cosmic. I imagine I would be having a very hard time deciding if what I actually willed was what I appeared to be willing. Do I really love my lengthy skin-care regime? Do I truly want to queue all night to purchase the latest iteration of my device? Does this social network genuinely make me feel happy and connected to others? Or did some unseen commercial entity decide all that for me? I don’t think teen-age misery is so very different from what it used to be, but I do think its scope of operation is so much larger and the space for respite vanishingly small. But I would think that: I’m forty-eight.

by Zadie Smith, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Yuki Sugiura; Source photograph by Daisy Houghton
[ed. See also: Time travel: What if you met your future self? (BBC):]

"There's a classic short story by Ted Chiang in which a young merchant travels years ahead and meets his future self. Over the course of the story, the man receives warnings, promises and tips from the older, wiser version of himself. These premonitions then change the course of the merchant's life until he eventually becomes an older man, who meets his younger self and imparts the same wisdom.

Scenarios like this are wildly popular and have been explored in many other novels as well as in movies like Back to the Future, and TV shows as diverse as Family Guy, Quantum Leap, and the BBC's own Doctor Who (see "The Doctor meets The Doctor" below).

For obvious reasons, these narratives have always been relegated to the realm of science fiction. But what if – and it is a big what if – you could meet your future self? What a very strange question, but one that I believe is worth asking. (...)

Now, imagine conversing with that future version of you in the same way you might chat with a friend or loved one now. What would you ask? My own knee-jerk response – and that of other people I’ve discussed it with – is often resistance. The source of this, I think, boils down to our desire to see ourselves as unique. How, we wonder, could an algorithm make a prediction about me – me with my many-coloured feathers that make me one in eight billion?

Yet I must accept – grudgingly – that I am not as unique as I like to think, and algorithms already predict my personality, desires and choices on a regular basis. Every time I listen to a personalised Spotify playlist, or love a Netflix film recommendation, a form of AI has predicted it. As these algorithms get more powerful, with greater access to data about us and other similar people, there's no reason they couldn't go beyond surface-level details like your future self's entertainment choices. They might be able to predict how the older, wiser version of you might feel about the decisions in your life.

Eight questions to ask "future you"

So, to return to my original question: if you could time-travel to meet your future self, what aspects of your life would you want to know more about? Which ones would you prefer to be shrouded in secrecy? And if you’d pass up on the meeting, why?

I've been thinking a lot about what I would do. My first instinct would be to ask my future self things like… are you happy? Are your family members happy and healthy? Is the environment safe for your grandkids and great-grandkids?

The more I considered these initial questions, the more I realised just how much I was concerned with what the future holds. A very informal survey of my wife and a few friends suggests I may not be alone in this tendency.

But reflecting on it further, I realised that the most powerful questions would be ones that helped me make better choices today. With that as the goal, I might generate several queries meant to kick off a dialogue between my two selves, such as:

• What have you been most proud of and why?

• In what ways – both positive and negative – have you changed over time?

• What's something that you miss most from earlier in your life?

• What actions have you regretted?

• What actions did you not take that you regret?

• What’s a time period you'd most want to repeat?

• What things should I be paying more attention to now?

• Which things should I stress about a little less?

Imagine if you were to put these eight questions to your future self. What might you find out that would modify how you live now? It’d probably be the most important conversation of your life." 

~ Time travel: What if you met your future self?  (BBC/Hal Hershfield)