Hey Essay.
Why is everyone writing letters to their younger selves? Also, who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?
I don’t want to write a letter to my younger self because I’m worried that it would just say, “Run!’ and that would be ominous.
I don’t want to write a letter to my younger self because he doesn’t even know where all the anxiety is coming from yet, and while that might be a good thing to tip him on, all the other advice would probably freak him out. He’s a little fragile. He’s also, right now as I’m imagining him, not yet the sharpest knife in the drawer.
He’s going to have to figure it out. I don’t want to put a finger on the scale. Do you know why? Because I know his story. He eventually figures it out, mostly after fucking it up, just like the rest of us.
And when he gets smart enough and old enough to really understand what people mean by “figure it out,” he’ll be wise enough to know that’s bullshit. Nobody ever figures it out. Just thinking on it is the revelation. Just wondering is the joy; it’s the lesson.
What good are words vs. experience?
I understand what’s at work in these letter-to-self essays, what gears are turning back the hands of time until they embrace the Disney-esque nostalgia. I don’t fault their existence. I just never wanted to fully indulge myself in that literary style, although I’m self aware enough to know this is a coy approximation, of being too cool to wear the band shirt at the band concert.
But isn’t the wisdom exhausting and cloying? Aren’t all of these “stand for something” and “be kinder to yourself” and “blaze an independent path” hosannas a little less realistic than might be worthwhile, if, let’s assume, our younger selves could read these letters?
Shouldn’t they all start with, “Invest in Apple and Facebook” and go from there?
I have high-minded ideas of what mine would say, but in reality it would be, “For the love of all things holy, DO NOT GO INTO JOURNALISM,” partly because I could then invest in Apple and Facebook, had I chosen a more profitable career.
Yes, I’m aware that I would not be me if that were the case.
I’m good with that.
I would not be here, on Substack, writing an essay about not writing a letter to my younger self.
I would be in some corporation; an insurance or real estate agent, or a mailman, and I would still say, with soul-rattling authority:
“THANK WHATEVER GODS YOU BELIEVE IN THAT YOU DIDN’T GO INTO JOURNALISM.”
We want to write letters to our younger selves because we want to be better people, which is honorable, and to have taken easier paths to get there, with less pain, less decade-exhausting wrong turns, less suffering and more enlightenment.
Which is, as you have sussed out, utter bullshit.
We are who we are because we fumbled our way there, for better or worse.
I would rather write a letter to my middle brother and say: Don’t be an addict. I think that will really help you. Don’t take pills or drink yourself blind or put needles in your arm — did you do that? — so that you pass out in your car at a dodgy park and I see you at 6 a.m. on my paper route when I’m 12.
That’s a better letter.
A letter to myself that says, “At some point in your college era you’re going to have a pony tail and, inexplicably, a mustache, at the same time, and both of them are horrendous choices (and there’s a photo to prove it), so just don’t do either and you’ll get laid a lot more.”
That’s a handy one.
But everyone wants to say, “Love yourself more.” And while I completely agree, for all of us, too much “cut yourself some slack” Goop-styled “goodness” just misses the whole point of wandering in the desert of life.
Giving yourself a better map is a cheat code, and using a cheat code makes you a lesser person, not a better person.
I do believe in life hacks. I think they should be handed down. I try this with my own kids and what I think happens is they ignore them, as I would have, and continue on their own singularly personal journey to wherever they are going.
I would rather write letters to my own kids — and have, but this being the technology era, I passed them along in Apple Notes — than send one to myself (except the one that says, “Buy a shit-ton of Apple stock, especially when it’s worthless,” because then I wouldn’t have to send my kids any letters, I could just leave them a bunch of houses, and if they fuck that up, it’s on them.
Whether we like it or not, getting that perm is necessary. Wearing those jeans with that jeans jacket that had a bunch of patches from your mom and Aunt was necessary. Putting your hand on that motorcycle exhaust pipe — not exactly necessary, but you never did it again. Jumping your bike like Evel Knievel after school with the dozen or so kids you told to be there, then knocked yourself out in the process? It wasn’t great for you, but it was super helpful for them.
Everyone has worn a dress they shouldn’t have, at the wrong time. Everyone has proudly played a record for their friends when, in retrospect, that album was embarrassing horseshit from a cultural moron baby-person (meaning: you) and you should have just gone with Led Zeppelin or something. Some cool rapper. Phoebe Bridgers. Anyone.
It was already in a song, people — ashes to ashes, we all fall down.
All of our lives, we learn from falling down even though we wish we hadn’t fallen down to learn the lesson; even if we want to tell our kids, if we have them, or our friends, if we have them, how to avoid falling down.
A part of me wants to write the letter, too. I feel you. But the letter isn’t going to help in the way we want it to.
Living is experience. That’s what helps.
Don’t you wonder, as you read these letters from people to their younger selves, what you would have done had you received a letter from your older, totally annoying, super uncool, elder self?
“Be happier? What the fuck does that mean?”
This is the sagest advice I can pass on to my kids — and I just did this on Father’s Day, by the way: “All that matters is that you’re happy.”
That is 1,000 percent true and accurate. I believe that. I believe that almost enough to write a letter or put it in an Apple Notes entry for them (that they can share, because I enabled sharing).
They are smart kids. They understand that being happy is probably the only thing that matters — except maybe having enough money to be happy or having good health or not being a part of World War III.
They know that being happy is all that matters, without me telling them, even on Father’s Day.
Except it’s in their soul somewhere; it’s in the corner of their brain; it’s in the lyrics of a song they heard me play when they were five years old. It’s there, but not present. It’s relevant, but not top of mind.
It’s obvious without me saying it.
Maybe not as obvious as me shouting, “No, really, trust me, just find your way to Paris and be broke as shit and you’ll be happier than you could ever imagine if you instead went to work for Imagine Entertainment.”
That’s a bulky sentiment. I don’t think they would retain it.
Kids, let me play you this terrible fucking song called, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”
Happiness. It’s all I want for them just as it’s all I want for me.
It just took me a long time to understand it and, even with every ounce of electrical impulses in my brain wanting to shout/write/sing/hand-letter it to them years and years before they might connect on the same level with the same relevance I’m feeling now, I’m not convinced you can hack life like that.
We can teach others, but we forget that we only found that knowledge ourselves by going up the garden path and taking the long way around, not by reading a letter from the future.
Dear Tim,
Brilliant writing. Moving. You are indeed highly talented and you know it so feel the responsibility to write. And it helps us. Thanks.
I THOUGHT that spelling was off (or were you just being a clever boy)...
https://www.dictionary.com/e/translations/ese/