The Stranger You'll Become

There's a finding in neuroscience that when researchers ask people to think about their future selves, the brain's activity looks less like self-reflection and more like thinking about a stranger. The neural signature of "me in ten years" resembles the neural signature of "someone I don't know" more than it resembles "me right now."

When I first encountered this, I thought about the years I'd spent seeking risk the way some people seek out safety.

During and after my undergrad days, I constantly pursued activities that have risk or adrenaline written all over them. Professionally, I was looking for anything but the status quo; saying yes to everything just so I could work at a startup, launching (and failing with) a company with a friend, supporting unproven investment platforms, and thinking companies that didn't quite align with what I believed were cool because they raised a Series A. 

They all moved fast enough that the misalignment with my values remained in the background. 

At the time, it felt like the right thing. Maybe not purposeful, but definitely exciting. A good day looked like I was a part of something bigger than myself, accepting everything I heard as the best way to build a company, and exchanging social capital with peers. I was taught that the path to where I wanted to go ran through uncertainty.

And I wouldn’t say I was wrong about most of that, exactly. The only certainty in life is that life is uncertain, and my path has brought me many positive experiences. But I also know now that the path was doing more than one thing during these seemingly exciting moments. 

My state of mind wasn’t concerned with the connection between my adventures and my relationship to risk or money. I don’t think it was a connection I was capable of making, because the risk-seeking felt indistinguishable from ambition. While it was easy for many to fall into this mindset at the time, I was still a culprit.

This probably showed up in various ways to my friends and family, the latter of which began sharing financial complexities with me that I wasn’t sure how to process. It was also around the same time that one of my friends asked me why I cared so much about my job and the company I worked for. My answer was, objectively, ignorant, short-sighted, and greedy.

I’d say that's about when I understood what I had been doing. Alongside and underneath the deflection, my misalignment was shaping which risks felt livable and which didn't.

I had spent over 5 years operating for startups or large corporations, working with people who simply didn’t care about the second-order effects of their businesses on people or the planet. I had a hard time liking myself for a while after this; I accepted that I was being thoughtful, but actually, I was avoiding thoughts.

Emotion, like energy, was never meant to stay where it was put. I'd spend the following years learning why.

———

Parallel circumstances brought the unexamined material back into contact with my life. My family and their tensions, other problems resurfacing in new configurations.

I still felt like I was at square one. The way my individuation materialized cost me years of misdirection, not addressing the unexamined inner workings and believing things would just “work out”. 

I accumulated thoughts that always felt like they didn’t match my earlier self. While I recognized it, I didn’t know how to address it. The family's financial narrative was definitely turned on in the background, obligation to people being confused with obligation to money. 

Although there wasn't a conversation that marked the shift here, there was a form. Being named the secondary account holder on bank accounts. A designation less than a discussion, though it was here when something informally true for years became true on paper, and the weight of it felt like brain fog.

The entanglement of where I thought I’d be by then (while supporting my loved ones accordingly) and the financial narrative playing out felt shameful.

This signal shaped my self-perception, likely more than I'd allowed myself to see. Convergence felt like distance collapsing from within, less than insight gained from the outside. I suppose I could only see the path by seeing where I’d left it. It would take me longer to understand why that recognition mattered than it did to have it.

———

A principle in how living systems build trust has stayed with me since I encountered it in learning about biomimicry over 10 years ago. Organisms don't trust because they decide to; trust emerges when conditions shift, when engagement becomes the more viable choice, and when the cost of continued distance exceeds the cost of contact. The decision follows the conditions.

I’m starting to think that self-trust operates in the same way. You can't necessarily begin it by deciding to; you begin it when the external problem and the internal one can no longer be held separately. Like when the relationship you find troubling or unsustainable, or your stance feels unbalanced stop looking like external forces and start looking like one problem with an internal source.

I have come to recognize an interesting occurrence of this in conversations with people navigating wealth, where they are often remarkably articulate about their situation. They can name the exciting activities or the complicated times. The fluency about where the money is going and who it affects overrides where they themselves stand inside it.

But sometimes I also notice that one’s personal position can feel removed among all of the decisions. There have been moments where I seemingly see the heartstrings of a person get pulled in opposite directions, one side held by agency and the other held by family or the associated amounts. These positions are tightly knit in most people, so when complexity deepens, pulling on one pulls on the other, and it can feel like an internal eruption. 

Though I still notice that what tends to close these conversations tries to mirror our ways of operating, scheduling another meeting or looping someone else in. What’s really being rescheduled is the inner problem. I've stopped being surprised by this, so I just note where it retreats to, and whether it looks any smaller than last time.

When you’re always stuck thinking about the future, it can be frustrating to just be present. The list never ends; more planning conversations, investment decisions, events to attend. Except when the inner problem never has the opportunity to offer itself as the more manageable one, there it will remain, waiting in the corner, observing.

———

Working with those who might identify themselves as somewhere before that convergence, they are oriented toward the external version of their situation. The deferral, while progress there is less legible than the balance sheet, isn’t being responsible. Though it’s also easier said than done to prioritize what can be moved within yourself and not rely on the other decisions to help inch closer toward “everything working out in the end”.

What I can say about the other side of it is that it feels like no longer having to organize energy around not seeing something. Before this state, a thought I kept returning to was something along the lines of “how will I know when I’m ready?” I was bracing for disappointment or that thing not to work out, another misstep to chalk up as an L.

I take this to mean that the distance isn't metaphorical. The person who will eventually have to reckon with the deferred inner work registers, neurologically, as a stranger; someone else's problem, to be solved by someone else’s effort.

This reframes the deferral in a way I find more useful than any moral argument about avoidance. It isn't weakness or lack of self-awareness, but a predictable feature of how the brain processes time; the future self is genuinely harder to feel as continuous with the present one. 

Making the future self feel less like a stranger is what building self-trust actually means. And like all trust, it doesn’t show up by decision, rather when conditions shift in the present self’s favor.

The distance being gone is like putting on a new pair of glasses, seeing what was previously blurry or inaccessible. It simply feels different to carry something in front of you, closer, than trying to walk with an indescribable weight on your shoulders, behind you. 

I don't know what will bring the two problems into contact for those reading this. For me, it was circumstances. That moment will be different for everyone, and it will arrive whether or not it's invited. What will you have spent by the time it does?