There have always been variations on the theme of a Letter to a Younger Me.

Irrespective of region and genre, writers have long expressed the desire to give earlier versions of themselves the benefit of their hard-won learning and life experience.

We tend to be self-centered in our youth, focused on the short-term and confident in our apparent immortality.  Our search for the next hedonic high relegates existential concerns like meaninglessness and death to the realm of distant intellectual concepts that happen to someone else.

As we get older, the inevitable appearance of catastrophe forces us to ponder the direction of our lives and correct our course accordingly. There is no instruction manual for life, so we resort to the trial-and-error learning that we call “experience.” Eventually this cache of “what has worked” and “what hasn’t worked” leads us to better decisions. It is only natural that we would wish to share this knowledge to help others (and our younger selves) avoid pain.

Life experience comes from living.

To gain true wisdom, however, there really is no substitute for life experience. You can’t get it from books or even (gasp!) YouTube videos. You must go out into the world and see what works. The experience you would include in a Letter to a Younger Me doesn’t come in a one-size-fits-all package; it is different for everyone. The task is to find the best path for the specific situation in which you currently find yourself.

The concept of “If I only knew then what I know now,” is especially useful in conversations about your purpose. A lifetime of learning “what works” can eventually coalesce into a path towards meaning in life – your life purpose.

It is a valuable exercise to write a letter to your younger self, even if you can’t really deliver it. An accounting of life’s lessons shows you just how far you have come. It summarizes a kind of experiential “best practices.”

Letters to your younger self will change over time.

I have written several iterations of advice to a younger me through the years. Many are of the  “tempus fugit” variety that commonly admonish you to tell someone you love them before it’s too late, or to spend time with your little ones in the blink of an eye that they are still little.

Some versions of the Letter to a Younger Me involve specific advice about a particular situation. The more circumstantial these snippets of advice, the more likely they are to be forgotten in the procession of years. We change, as do our specific life circumstances.

It seems that general wisdom best withstands the passage of time. Advice that rings as true at 60 as it did at 40 and 20 tends to be much more global. This is advice of the Ten Commandments or Golden Rule sort. Be kind whenever you can. Treat people with love and respect whenever you can. Thou shalt not steal. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

I find that my Letters to a Younger Me are now much shorter.

I have spent most of my adult life (and several years before I was an adult) trying to carve a better life out of a cruel and uncaring world. The struggle looks different now, in the “20-20 hindsight” of several decades. The Sisyphean task of a rise to relative freedom from the indentured servitude of the lower-middle class could be retrospectively viewed as a long and exhausting grind.

But it was much more than that.

When viewed in detail, the way you reminisce over a bunch of old photos, you see the specific innumerable moments that taught you, that made your life unique. You will find there is much to celebrate – perhaps even to be proud of – in those moments.

No matter how dire the summary of a chunk of your life may appear, there are sparks of triumph in the ashes; joy to be found in spite of – or maybe because of – the hard times.

My Letter to a Younger Me would be quite simple, now:

Pay attention. These are the best times of your life.

As always, I welcome your thoughts. You can reach me through the comments section on my Substack or Medium accounts or the blog section on my website. If this article as of value to you, please follow my Instagram and Twitter accounts. And be sure to subscribe to my River Of Creation podcast – The Podcast for Creators! – coming later this year.

Be well; do good!

• JWW