By Joe Byerly
Here’s what happened this weekend:
Friday: One more drink. One more hour around the fire pit. Then I’ll head home. I’ll deal with the consequences tomorrow.
Saturday morning: What the hell was I thinking? I’m exhausted. The alcohol wrecked my sleep last night.
Saturday afternoon: I’m going to take it easy tonight—head to bed early so tomorrow I can be productive again.
We are all three different people—the past self, the present self, and the future self. And most days, it feels like a battle to keep them in balance.
Friday night Joe wasn’t thinking about Saturday morning Joe and Saturday morning Joe paid for it. So Saturday afternoon Joe made some decisions so future Joe could get back on track.
Our present selves can make it harder on our future selves, but we can also send them gifts too.
In a recent conversation on the podcast with Ryan Holiday, who just published his 17th book (Wisdom Takes Work), he talked about how this plays out in his life:
“Everything I know, everything I write is a lagging indicator of work I did in the past… so I have to remind myself that it’s a form of time travel. It’s a gift I’m giving my future self.”
The present Ryan reads hundreds of books, creates thousands of notecards, and the future Ryan uses those to write for which he is grateful to his past self.
We’re all living in a constant state of time travel. What we have today comes from choices our past selves made, and what we’ll have tomorrow depends on what we do right now.
And we can take this to extremes.
We can sacrifice everything for the future—delay joy, push through discomfort, save our energy and time for some imagined better version of ourselves. But when that future arrives, we often look back with regret at all the moments we never allowed ourselves to enjoy.
Or we can live fully in the present—say yes to every indulgence, every impulse, every “you only live once.” But when YOLO becomes yesterday, we’re left with the tab: a tired body, an anxious mind, and a long list of problems for the future self to figure out.
This weekend reminded me that even when I’m frustrated with my past self—my present self still gets a vote. I can choose to gift something better to my future self.
The battle between these three selves never ends. The goal isn’t to let one win—it’s to get them to cooperate.
