To my past self

Dear my past self,

How are you? I am you – from the future. It’s 2033, and as crazy as it might sound (and how ever trite the opening is – my apologies for that), don’t throw this letter just yet. Trust me: take 10 minutes to read this. You will be grateful for yourself doing so.

I wish I can send this letter to you a few years earlier, but time machine was only invented a month ago. Just only 10 years into the future, scientists finally hacked the physics of quantum entanglement and devised a way to transport matter across different time-frames. This technology is still in its infancy, though. After careful experimentation, my close friend of mine who was the mastermind of this (he’s Mike by the way) told me that the maximum scale of the object capable for time travel was too small to bring humans back in time. They tried to bring a dog back in time: the dog was named Laika, and let’s just say it the dog didn’t end up well. Fortunately, the size of letter was just right for the time travel machine. I can keep rambling all about the future, and how the world has become better and worse. But that wasn’t my intention. I requested Mike to sent this letter to you – with only one mission in mind.

There’s a reason why I am writing the letter to you in 2023. You lived well, the hopeful one. I believed that you feel you have changed so much since you graduated from high school, and you are proud of it. But deep down, you are still not content, you still feel stuck. You have your hopes, your dreams, but they always seem to elude you. You sense that your progress are spotty and frustrating, and that it you do better, faster. You have thoughts that bombard you, you have impulses that shove you around. Don’t despair, don’t curse yourself. Episodes of struggle like this might seem hopeless at the immediate moment, but in retrospect, they are the prelude of the most transformative epiphanies in your life.

Do you still remember reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra? Among his bursts of insight, he vividly invoked the notion of the overman. He/she is a person that composes their own values and goals, and achieves them with their will and imagination. The overman as an ideal is paradoxically selfish and selfless, individualistic and humanitarian: the overman emboldens his/her own psychology to get the things he/she wants in life, pushing his own limits to become the best version of themselves; people around the overman, entranced by the relentless pursuit for excellence, became inspired to pursue excellence of their own. In other words, the overman is the ultimate sublimation of the human innate instinct to create and influence. For those like us who value creation and power, the image of the overman shines stronger and brighter.

Living for 10 years more than you, I can absolutely guarantee that this year is the year, your year of absolute transformation. This is the year when you will completely shed our old skin, and reborn into the overman you and I deeply strive for. I wasn’t able to pinpoint to exact date when it would happen, but I am confident that 2023 built the person that would lead to your success. I have achieved what you have dreamt of: I’m a high respected professional who made breakthroughs in my industry, my intellectual and political aspirations well-received by the public and growing in strength; I have a group of close friends with whom to share adventure, trust, humour and intelligence, and I bless myself with an enduring, lively feminine presence. While I still have so much to learn and grow, I can tell you that I am happy – and so can you.

I worry that my success story may terrify more than it should motivate you – I understand. While I speak to your definitive ambition for excellence, the alluring endpoint was enmasked by a misty spectre of fear: the fear of social disapproval and ostracism, the fear of losing your “true self”, the fear of failure, the fear of harming others… the list goes on. However you might rationalize the omnipresent, prohibitive feeling that devalues the virtue of your aspirations, remember that they don’t serve you. They are the pebbles in your shoes when scaling to the peak of your own mountain. They deserve the least of your attention.

If we can summarize the collective wisdom that was preached and practiced since the beginning of human civilization in a single sentence, it is that to achieve success in the world, you shouldn’t take the advice of others too seriously. People have their own fears and desires, their emotions and irrationalities that by sheer permutation of variables would produce a worldview that is incongruent to your particular version of success. I acknowledge that there will be valuable mentors who would support you and would dispense truth and suggestions to set you in the right perspective and direction – the Internet can make the search for one easier. But ultimately, at your age, the need on removing and ignoring the wrong advice is greater than the work to find the right one. [1]

When you have gauged the probable direction your life, you would certainly be able to recognize the infinite number of directions that doesn’t fit with you. Sometimes those directions were handed over by a controlling parent, sometimes they came from faddery and social norms (beware of those who tell you something is “common sense”), sometimes they were crafted by money-centered corporations and selfish power brokers. I don’t make this statement to provoke bitterness or contempt. People like them will live with us and by virtue of doing so, will organically spread their own body of generalizations, associations, deletions, emotions, practice, standards and habits based on their experience, ignorance, and hearsay to the people around them. And you know what it means? It means that most people won’t provide you much value to your life, and it’s ok. It is your task to accept reality as it is, and create intelligent filters to incorporate those that fit with your goals, and banish all those that don’t at a safe distance.

Knowing this, take some time to reflect on the things that may have hypnotized or tricked you into doing things that doesn’t serve your goals, your ambition, your happiness. Examine all the actions and thoughts you had on a typical Tuesday, and ask yourself :”which are them serve a direct purpose towards your life, and which one are bad habits that redound no conceivable endpoint or state of healthy fulfilment?” Are you guilty of indulging short term satisfaction like social media? Have you recently been hanging out with the wrong people, or committing to the wrong responsibilities? You know what to do with them now. [2]

But there is more – my advice goes deeper than that. To assert full sovereignty of your life, it is not enough to align your habits and behaviour to a coherent ambition. Because the world can emasculate your will in insidious ways – via words, phrases, an metaphors that shame, belittle, gaslight, discipline you. They are daggers that while appear unthreatening, are subtle ways that others use to impose their views and morals onto you. They are invisible strings attached on your limbs, to be toyed by a faceless puppet-master.

You must cleanse the adversarial words, thoughts, and tropes from it’s emotional charge, and cut yourself off from those to seek to corrode your drive from within. The world is full of half-truths that conspires to prevent most people to achieve the best version of themselves, and it takes a strong independent mind to make up of their true colours: the language of self-pity, the obsession with the “true personality” and the “authentic self”, the moral need to be agreeable and uncritical; these, and so many other linguistic and affective ploys, are thoughts and feelings not of your own. Be aware of them, and learn to be immune to them.

One of the greatest linguistic scandal of modern society is the word fear. Think of the time you are engulfed by a surge of trepidation. You feel your heart beating faster, your breathing becomes more shallow, your pupils dilate, your skin would start to tingle, and even thaw. Now think of the time when you are on a trip on a alien place, exploring something new that you love doing, or rest your eyes on a stranger you feel strangely attracted to. You feel excitement, and guess what, your body reacts in the same way just as when you are fearful. You see? Fear and excitement originate from the selfsame physiological response, but former uses that swell of emotions to immobilize, the latter to galvanize. Society might be provide a reason for making us fearful on one occasion, and exhilarated on another, but does it matter? What matters is if this emotional template suits you! Shift their meaning, decouple them from their traditional connotations, own the power of words to your hands. Language is the most underrated magic that we use every single day, so use it to your own advantage.

Reading till this point, I bet you are now basked in the sublime glory of understanding, just as the cathartic moment when I encountered these truths myself. I was inspired, but I was also confused. Because I wondered why people didn’t teach me about this earlier. Why didn’t I have the fortune to encounter some wise person to dispense valuable truth when I was perhaps younger? But if you think about it, how can they know? Truth, as it has always been, exposes how easily we are influenced by the people around us, how superficial our unique identities actually turn up, how self-absorbed we can often be, and how cowardly when we are to assert the things that hold the closest to us. Who wants to admit that they are less independent, less self-aware, less humble, less unique, less intelligent, less brave than they think themselves to be? If they can’t accept this fact, how can you expect them to teach this fact to others?

At this moment, I have to stop myself from writing further. I shouldn’t write to much on the details on self-empowerment, or descant on the harsh facts about the world. To do that is to spoil you from the fulfilling experience of learning and growing on your own. To be clear, reading this letter, you already have an immense privilege to learn these things that some don’t even have the capacity to comprehend. If you internalize the message of my letter, you are ready to strive for excellence. Master the power of focus and clarity of intent, master the power of language and emotions. If you do that, you will become the overman everyone has the capacity to become.

I wish you all the best, __.

Warmly,

Your future self, 2033.

Footnotes:
[1] Ironically, the Internet – particularly, but not limited to, social media – is the greatest enemy to that goal.
[2] Please don’t harm other people unnecessarily while doing so 😀

References:
Barthes, R., Lavers, A., & Reynolds, S. (2009). Mythologies. Vintage.

Cent, 50, & Greene, R. (2013). The 50th law. Profile Books.

Farber, P. H. (1995). Futureritual: Magick for the 21st Century. Eschaton.

Nietzsche, F. W., & Hollingdale, R. J. (1961). Thus spoke Zarathustra. Harmondsworth.

Nietzsche, F. W., Scarpitti, M. A., & Holub, R. C. (2013). On the genealogy of morals: A polemic. Penguin Books.

Stauss, N. (2005). The game. Canongate.

Writing tip to myself:
Allow yourself to write without being tied up with the terminologies and system of thought laid out by authors – that is to be original, and you can really feel the joyful process of producing something authentic, compared to merely rearranging and regurgitating the ideas created by others. Even though you are, philosophically speaking, never original with your thoughts and ideas, the intent of writing from your own voice will make you a better writer, no least making the process of writing an immeasurably fulfilling one.